On their eighth studio album, *Wake Up, Sunshine*, All Time Low has perfected their hook-heavy pop-punk formula—and they’ve done so without falling into the seductive trappings of nostalgia. “There’s a big distinction,” frontman Alex Gaskarth told Apple Music. “We weren’t trying to sound like we sounded 12 years ago. But some of that energy shines through. It’s a really cool amalgamation of everything that’s come before it.” Just don’t for a second think they’ve run out of tricks. The band’s new album runs the gamut of their career, centering on optimistic songs as luminous and unclouded as the title suggests. There’s the self-referential fan service of “Some Kind of Disaster,” the Y2K-era blink-182-channeling “Sleeping In,” and the pulsating palm-muted power chords of “Safe.” Then there are moments of unexpected innovation: the rhythmic structure of “Trouble Is,” the country influence of “Favorite Place,” and All Time Low’s first foray into hip-hop on “Monsters.” “I hope that when people listen to the album, it’s a reminder of why they fell in love with the band in the first place,” guitarist Jack Bakarat says. “The focus all along has been to get back to the basics—capturing that magic again.” Below, Gaskarth breaks down each song on *Wake Up, Sunshine*, track by track. “There’s a lot of hope on the album,” he says. “There\'s a lot of looking forward to a brighter future. And I think that shines through.” **Some Kind of Disaster** “This was one of the first songs we wrote for the record. When we finished it, we all paused for a second and said, ‘Hey, that seems like it would be an amazing way to open a show.’ That conversation evolved into, ‘Well, if we\'d open a show with it, why not open a record with it?’ It feels like it\'s this declaration of our return and an anthemic call-to-arms song. I\'d say that it\'s autobiographical about the band in the chorus: ‘It\'s all my fault that I\'m still the one you want/So what are you after?/Some kind of disaster.’ I ask the fans if they\'re ready to do this all over again and take this ride again.” **Sleeping In** “When you\'re with the person you like, you just never want to go to sleep, because it\'s just too good of a time. You’re still up at 7 am and the next good idea is to put on Britney Spears and have a dance party. I’ve certainly done that many times. I think we’ve all been there. And I love a good pop reference.” **Getaway Green** “I wanted there to be a lot of color throughout this record. I wanted this to feel very vivid and bright. ‘Getaway Green’ is really about a sense of escapism, but also a SoCal Romeo and Juliet situation, where it\'s not meant to be but they want it to be, and eventually it\'s going to be.” **Melancholy Kaleidoscope** “It was a weird day in the studio. Nothing really seemed to be clicking and I was in a weather-induced funk. I was feeling some crazy seasonal depression. I wasn\'t in the mood to write uplifting music. And Zakk Cervini, our producer, came in with this idea for a fast, uptempo, Warped Tour-esque song. It\'s just not where my head was, so I made it a challenge for myself to make it work. In doing so, I started to take steps towards getting my head in a better place. ‘Melancholy Kaleidoscope’ was maybe the second \[song\] we wrote. It shaped the tone of the album, once I got over that hurdle.” **Trouble Is** “This was a fun one from beginning to end, because we challenged ourselves to do something with a weird, rhythmic cadence. It\'s these intervals of six and then seven, which is not an easy time signature to write a pop melody around. It actually ended up working really, really well. And then the song settles into 6/8 for the chorus, which just always feels big. It became this fun little math project. It\'s not like we\'re a sophisticated, techy math rock band, anyway. We\'re playing pop rock here at the end of the day.” **Wake Up, Sunshine** “It is the overall idea that in a world that feels like it\'s falling apart, and in a situation where it\'s very easy to self-doubt and become your own worst enemy, hanging on to the idea that someone out there is all about you is something that can really help pull you through. Knowing that all it really takes is just a connection with one other person out there can sometimes be the thing that gets you moving in the right direction again. And I think that sentiment echoes throughout the entire album.” **Monsters (feat. blackbear)** “We\'ve never really gone there before as a band, we\'ve never really featured a rapper on anything. And so it’s like, 15 years into a career, there\'s still some new things to try, and that happened to be the right one in the moment. It was really cool and special.” **Pretty Venom (Interlude)** “\[This is a\] 3 am-er. We write our dark songs late at night. The song\'s very reflective. I think it hearkens back to some of the woes throughout our career where we felt resentful towards people who didn\'t have the band\'s best interest in mind, and I got to speak to some of those things—just about how someone else\'s poison can poison you and it changes you as a person, and suddenly their toxicity is making you toxic.” **Favorite Place (feat. The Band CAMINO)** “When we wrote ‘Favorite Place,’ we all recognized that we were pulling some of \[The Band CAMINO’s\] influence. And so it only felt right to reach out to them and see if they wanted to be a part of it. Because it felt like, in some way, they had contributed to the writing of the song. They ended up enjoying the song and wanted to be a part of it. It was really fun. I love when you see some camaraderie between labelmates.” **Safe** “We all jokingly said that the songs we wrote in Nashville have a bit of a Nashville \[sound\] playing throughout them in some way, like ‘Safe,’ ‘Favorite Place,’ and ‘Getaway Green.’ They could all easily translate to what I think would be pretty rad country songs. So eventually we\'re going to have to make a Y\'all Time Low record.” **January Gloom (Seasons, Pt. 1)** “This was written during the session in Nashville in January \[2019\]. It was cold, rainy, miserable. It was just a difficult time. I felt myself really weighed down by it all. I felt a little bit aimless and I didn\'t have a ton of direction. Similar to ‘Melancholy Kaleidoscope,’ my lack of inspiration served as inspiration. And so, in this song, I\'m talking about sitting alone with the voice in my head, saying, ‘Give me something.’” **Clumsy** “‘Clumsy’ feels like a really staple All Time Low song that speaks to the legacy of the band. You could put it on almost any All Time Low record at any time in All Time\'s history and it would make sense, even though it sounds like the 2020 version of All Time Low. The lyrics of this song are all about loneliness and why you end up lonely.” **Glitter & Crimson** “To me, this song is about two characters who are deeply in love, whose love is not allowed to be that by \[a certain\] society. They\'re gay, and they don\'t feel like they\'re accepted in their own skin for who they are, or for who they want to love. It’s a cry out to seize that power back and saying, ‘No. You don\'t get to dictate how we live our lives.’ Obviously, I can\'t speak to that, being a straight guy, but I know a lot of people who live that experience every day. And it was something that felt very meaningful that I wanted to address for them because they can’t \[in this way\]. They aren\'t songwriters.” **Summer Daze (Seasons, Pt. 2)** “‘Summer Daze’ is a song about that celebratory feeling of elation that you get from, like, a summer camp romance. It’s that honeymoon phase where you know it\'s probably going to come to an end because it has to, but at the time, it was just everything.” **Basement Noise** “That’s how it all wraps up—an ode and a tribute to our humble beginnings, having this big dream of hopefully getting out on the road someday and making a go of it. If you\'d told us back then that we would be doing this 15 years later, record number eight, I don\'t think we would have ever believed you.”
“That was the trick: knowing who I was before I tried to tell anybody who I was, or before I let anybody else tell me who I was,” Ashley McBryde tells Apple Music. The magnetically natural singer and down-home storyteller with biker-bar swagger who snuck up on the country mainstream in the late 2010s honed her craft playing in bars. “I would not trade over a decade of playing in bars doing that, because the way I found out if a song was good or not was: Could I make somebody listen to it? And could I sneak it in between covers? I think that made the biggest difference, was just knowing that this is who I am and this is what I sound like when I went to make my first real record.” McBryde’s latest 11-song set, *Never Will*, the follow-up to 2018’s *Girl Going Nowhere*, makes few concessions to record label priorities or radio preferences. It does, however, range through riotous Southern gothic narration, classic honky-tonk transgression, blue-collar anthems of ambition, stoic mourning, and other cleverly altered, time-tested song forms. She, her trusty road band, and their producer Jay Joyce refracted those tunes through a process of studio experimentation that gave serrated contours to the grooves. Says McBryde, “If you\'ve got like a weird, quirky idea, and if your sentence starts with ‘This might sound stupid, but let\'s try,’ Jay will let you try it.” Here McBryde talks through each track on *Never Will*. **Hang In There Girl** “I saw this girl, she might\'ve been 14 or 15, she was standing at the mailbox. This mailbox has been used as a baseball many times. It has been crunched and uncrunched and crunched and uncrunched, and it was just barely sitting on the fence post. She was doing something that I had seen myself do: She was kicking rocks, and not in a mad-at-my-mom kind of way, but in like a ‘Why am I sitting here putting my toe in these rocks? And why is the grass so tall? And why are all the clothes I own, I\'m not the first person to own them?’ I\'m the youngest of six, and not only did I have to wear hand-me-downs, I had to wear my brother\'s hand-me-downs. When I got a bicycle, it wasn\'t because they were able to get me a bicycle. It\'s because one of my older cousins was done using theirs. There\'s nothing wrong with growing up that way. I\'m proud of the way I grew up. I just wanted to pull over and say, \'In only a couple of years, you\'re going to be old enough to get a job, you\'re going to have money, and you can get a car and you can leave this place. And I promise you, you will look fondly on this place once you leave.\'” **One Night Standards** “Nicolette \[Hayford\] and I, we wrote a song called ‘Airport Hotel.’ That hook was ending with, ‘I\'m still sitting here kicking myself for treating my heart like an airport hotel,’ because that\'s not a place you want to stay for very long. We thought we would just let it sit just as a verse and a chorus because something was wrong. Our next write together we had a third, and his name was Shane McAnally. We played him what we had, and he said, ‘I don\'t think there\'s anything wrong with this. Let\'s just keep playing through it and try maybe being a little more honest.’ And I said, ‘Well, there is a reason that hotel rooms only have one nightstand in them, because they\'re one-night-standers.’ And Shane said, ‘Did you say “standards”? Make that rhyme and put that at the end as the hook.’ Then the next verse just came out. It\'s sort of like a ‘Honey. It\'s okay. Don\'t freak out. I\'m going to lay the room key down right here, and if you pick it up and you meet me later, you do. And if you don\'t, it\'s no sweat off my back.’ I did get a little bit of flack when the single first came out, people saying, ‘It\'s not the most feminine thing you could\'ve said. It\'s not the most ladylike thing.’ I\'ve been called a lot of things, but a lady is not one of them.” **Shut Up Sheila** “It was a piano and guitar demo, and I loved it the second Nicolette sent it to me. I\'d never heard a country song about a dying grandmother. And anytime you get to say something like ‘shut up’ or drop an F-bomb, that\'s usually a cool thing to me, too. But there\'s somebody in everybody\'s family, whether they are holier-than-thou or not, that either on a holiday or in times of loss like this, you really just want to look at them and go, ‘Kind of wish you would just shut up.’ So just in case you\'re sitting there biting your tongue at Thanksgiving dinner, just go listen to the song. It made me think about loss, when it came to cut the record. When I lost my brother, I was so mad, and I remember being at the funeral and everyone being like, ‘Let\'s pray together for a minute.’ And I was like, ‘You know what? I don\'t want to pray right now. I want to be angry. I want to get drunk and I want to get high and I want to get away from this for a little bit.’ Everybody\'s going to deal with loss in a different way, and it\'s never okay to push how you deal with it on somebody else, so let\'s give everybody a little bit of breathing room here.” **First Thing I Reach For** “I wrote that with Randall \[Clay\] and Mick \[Holland\] in the morning. Randall came outside and poured whiskey in our coffee, and we all lit a cigarette. And we wrote it as a sad song. I get to the studio and I\'m like, ‘In my world, which is fingerpicking, midtempo songs, what if we played this one like we were a bar band but the bar is inside a bowling alley?’ My lead guitar player, he\'s got a Telecaster with a B-bender in it, and his father is a steel guitar player. So it wasn\'t hard at all for him to come up with a really cool riff there.” **Voodoo Doll** “I knew that I wanted that to be like a slow headbang on the metal side of things, and I didn\'t know how we were going to accomplish it. The band loved the song—we just weren\'t sure how we were going to do this in a studio. And I said, ‘Well, let\'s play it together and make it as big and loud as we can be and then give something small the lead. Let\'s make it a mandolin thing. Let\'s put the most traditional instrument inside the most rock ’n’ roll song. And let\'s take those really traditional sounds and make them with the overdriven guitars.’” **Sparrow** “Nicolette and I had had this idea for a song about sparrows for a long time. When I first started getting tattoos down my arms, the first two were sketches of sparrows on the backs of my arms. She had asked me, ‘Why two sparrows? Why were those the first things you put on your arms?’ And I said, ‘Because it\'s a pretty widely known fact that sparrows fly all over the world, and they never forget where home is. They have the ability to beacon themselves back to the tree they came from, and that is a quality I would love to keep in myself.’ I knew if we brought this subject up with Brandy Clark, she would be able to really help us bring it to life.” **Martha Divine** “I think this was our first song together, me and Jeremy Spillman. We were in the basement of an old church. So, I was like, ‘We should write something dark. I haven\'t written a murder song in a long time. Let\'s murder something.’ We came up with the name Martha Divine, who was an urban legend from his home state of Kentucky. We didn\'t use the actual story that surrounded Martha Divine, I just really liked the name. And I thought, ‘Well, what if it was like a Jolene situation, only the person that we\'re going to write the perspective from is this slightly psychotic, Bible-beating, overly-protective-of-her-mother little girl? Maybe she\'s 15, maybe she\'s 21. She needs to go back and forth, in my mind, between reciting Bible verses like a good little girl and smiling at you because she\'s about to hit you in the face with a shovel and she\'s so proud. I\'ve joked a couple times that cheating songs normally come from the perspective of cheating or being cheated on. Luckily, I was able to write it for the perspective of the daughter, and who knows where I got that perspective from. I\'m sure that my father will really appreciate that song on the record.” **Velvet Red** “When we first started cutting it, I was like, ‘Guys, we\'re going to have to play it as a band and then have \[Chris\] Sancho play that bass part on it, because it\'s really screwing with my head.’ It\'s a big hollow-body bass that he was playing, and he comes from a Motown and a blues background. And next thing we know is we have that \[part\], and it\'s so cool. That way you still get the traditional feel for ‘Velvet Red,’ which is what is best to let that story come through, but then you\'re not beat in the face with just the bluegrass feel either.” **Stone** “Nicolette and I, we have a pretty general rule that normally we don\'t write anything down until one of us cries, either from laughing or because we\'ve hit a nerve, and once we hit the nerve, we jump on it. Our brothers died in very, very different ways. They\'re both Army veterans, but her brother David was hit by a vehicle, and mine killed himself. So, we go outside to smoke, just chitchatting back and forth, trying to stay close to the topic and then get far enough away from it that we give ourselves some oxygen. And she said something, and I cackled, and when I cackled I went, ‘Oh my god, I laugh like him.’ It drives me nuts, and I just started bawling. And she goes, ‘There it is. You\'re so angry because you\'re so hurt, and the reason you\'re so hurt is because you didn\'t pay attention to how alike you were until he was dead. That\'s okay. Let\'s write from there.’ So it\'s not hopeless. It\'s ‘I see little bits of you in me.’ I think it needed to be on the record because it moved me farther through that process than therapy ever could have. Maybe it can help somebody else through it too.” **Never Will** “Matt \[Helmkamp\], our lead guitar player, sent over this guitar riff that he had been playing. It kind of had this cool groove to it. Mumbling around, we came up with ‘I didn\'t, I don\'t, and I never will.’ That\'s when we kind of dove into, remember those people that were mean to you because you wanted to do music? And now you\'re doing things like getting Grammy nominations and all you can do is think, \'You were so confused about the reason that we were making music and the way we were doing it and how I was only playing in bars. How the hell else do you think you get to play in arenas if you don\'t play in bars? A career is not a participation trophy.” **Styrofoam** “I used to play this writers’ night at Blue Bar \[in Nashville\]. It was called the Freakshow. Randall Clay was on stage one night and he just takes off, ‘Well, in 1941,’ and I was like, ‘What is he talking about?’ But by the time he got to the chorus, I\'m cracking up because this song is so much fun to sing, and it\'s actually educational. Randall was just one of those writers that could do that. I grew up eating gas station and truck stop food and getting my drinks from it. I know it\'s environmentally irresponsible, but things just taste better in styrofoam, and it\'s just fun to sing \'styrofoam.\' Of course, he died \[in October 2018\]. We really wanted to pay tribute to him. And there were two other of his songs that are in our live show that I wanted to put on the record that didn\'t get to be there. And on the last day of cutting, Jay goes, ‘I wish we had one more song that was just super fun to listen to.’ So I sat down and sang ‘Styrofoam.’”
On *iimini*, Bongeziwe Mabandla charts the path of a relationship with as much flux as his musical journey. He and producer Tiago Correia-Paulo fuse folk and electronic music, and traditional sounds with experimental inclinations. “I really found the making of this album such a beautiful experience because everything that comes into an album is a moment,” he tells Apple Music. “With my previous work I felt like a lot of my subject matter was very serious so I wanted to do something totally different, to hit a subject that was lighter. I wanted people to know that I\'m not one dimensional and don\'t think in one way. My previous album was about spirituality and about God so I decided to write this whole album about a relationship and love.” Throughout, he deftly weds the experience of living in moments with the craft of capturing them. Here, Bongeziwe explains the 12 tales that form *iimini’s* story. **mini esadibana ngayo (#001)** “The day we met. This song is a ‘once upon a time’ type of thing. It\'s the first day that you meet somebody and I wanted to kind of open the story. It’s a true story: all the work I write is always from true experiences in some way. The lyrics go ‘I was always alone watching others walk, not knowing where my heart is. I didn’t know true feeling before, till I met you.’” **masiziyekelele (14.11.16)** “I actually wrote this first and then joined the intro into it. I worked backwards. The music I make is soul music, I always want it to have a lot of feeling so it’s been an interesting experimental phase. It’s something I was really opposed to in the beginning, like ‘I don\'t wanna dilute my sound and who I am.’ I like to take advice sometimes and I met the right person who understood my music and what I was trying to do, and we’re working in a way where that soul element is not lost.” **salanabani (13.8.18)** “This is kind of like a break-up song and I was influenced by the song ‘Down On My Knees’ by Ayo. It\'s really one of those songs where you’re left by your lover but it’s not like ‘I’m gonna survive.’ It’s when you completely say all the wrong things to someone who’s gonna leave you, things you’ll regret like ‘I’m gonna die without you.’ It’s pathetically asking someone to stay with you—that’s the word I\'m looking for.” **ndanele** “We had a reference of the kind of track we wanted to do and tried out different things in the studio—almost like a James Blake kind of vibe with my voice. It’s like when you’ve invited somebody into your life and they have to see your dysfunction. Its really telling somebody ‘I’ve actually been through a lot and I’ve had things happen to me,’ but it’s also saying “If you say you love me, I need you to love me in a big, deep and serious way.” **zange** “‘Zange’ is about how love changes you and finally having the courage to tell someone how you feel. It\'s about that returned love and how it feels on the body. It’s really the healing element in life: being loved in return.” **(9.2.17)** “I placed dates to kind of inform me of the story a bit—when certain things happened. But the songs didn\'t quite work out like that.” **khangela** “‘Khangela’ is actually a song about loneliness and it’s written about all the things I’ve done while trying to look for love... the regrets and many mistakes I’ve gone through in the name of looking. This song is definitely my most revealing. I had moments like that with this album, like ‘Are you sure you wanna write this, should you not hold back on revealing yourself?’ I had to overcome certain things like that while writing this album. If you lack a certain kind of love you’re kind of obsessed with trying to find it. Rejection breeds obsession and it’s about that.” **jikeleza** “I did a lot of experimenting on this song. The imagination of this was ‘How would it feel live?’ So I wanted to have that (call and response) interaction with an audience.” **ukwahlukana (#027)** “This one is based on a fight. I based it around Joburg so the places I sing about are actual places. I just wanted to write about the dysfunctional side of love. It’s about giving someone a second chance, who just can’t seem to treat you right. Sometimes the people you love are the people that hurt you the most or that you hurt the most. I think because this album is about love, my singing choices are very much Xhosa R&B-ish, very in-your-feels and I thought having Son Little made that R&B vibe come out even more.” **bambelela kum (4.6.18)** “This is a very simple song and I think that’s the beauty of it... it’s not poetic just literal. I think it’s my favourite song on the album, I really love it. It’s so short ‘cause it was our last day and we had 30 minutes in studio. The whole reason I wrote the song was seeing a lot of people who love each other not seem to make it work. I’ve sometimes not made it work with people that I really cared about and loved. It’s really about having tolerance for someone. It’s written when a relationship is basically finished and we’re trying to remember why we got together in the first place.” **isiphelo (#Untitled)** “‘Isiphelo’ really developed on the road. The band started playing it and we worked on the idea. By the time we officially got to record it we had a certain idea of what we wanted to do already. We did a lot of things on tour because Tiago is also in my band so there’s stuff we did in Paris and Germany. I always believe that everything you hear influences you in a way, even though you’re not very conscious of it. I do think the different places, and how we made it sort of on the road meant I had to be creative in where I write and how I write.” **ndiyakuthanda (12.4.19)** “Basically this is one song with ‘Isiphelo,’ I was repeating some things... the most important parts of the album. Through all those experiences the connection will always be there, even though we’re not physically together. It\'s the conclusion of it all, ‘I can never stop loving you.’”
Since Bruce Springsteen last released an album with the E Street Band—*High Hopes*, 2014’s collection of re-recorded outtakes and covers—he’s spent a lot of time thinking about his past. He followed his 2016 memoir *Born to Run* the next year with a one-man Broadway show in which he reimagined his songs as part of an intimate narrative about his own life and career. And while his 20th LP was recorded completely live with the band in a four-day sprint—for the first time since 1984’s *Born in the USA*—the songs themselves bear the deliberation and weight of an artist who knows he’s running out of time to do things like this. “The impetus for a lot of the material was the loss of my good friend George Theiss,” Springsteen tells Apple Music. “When he passed away, it left me as the only remaining living member of the first band that I had, which was a very strange thought, and it gave rise to most of the material. There\'s aging and loss of people as time goes by, and that\'s a part of what the record is. And then at the same time, you\'re sort of celebrating the fact that the band goes on and we carry their spirits with us.” That combination of wistfulness and joy—propelled by the full force of an E Street Band that’s been playing together in some form for nearly 50 years, minus two departed founding members, Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici—drives “Last Man Standing” and “Ghosts” most explicitly, but imbues the entire project. Though this may have been recorded live and fast, nothing sounds ragged or rambunctious; the efficiency owes to the shorthand of a unit that knows each other’s moves before they make them. While most of the songs were written recently, “Song for Orphans,” “If I Was the Priest,” and “Janey Needs a Shooter” date back to the early ’70s, only adding to the feeling of loose ends being tied. And it’s not lost on Springsteen after this long period of reflection that this album fits into a larger story that he’s been telling for most of his life. “If you wanted to find a body of work that expressed what it was like to be an American, say from 1970 to now, in the post-industrial period of the United States—I\'d be a place you could go and get some information on that,” he says. “And so in that sense, I always try to speak to my times in the way that I best could.” Here he digs deeper into just a few of the highlights from *Letter to You*. **One Minute You’re Here** “It\'s unusual to start a record with its quietest song. The record really starts with \'Letter to You,\' but there\'s this little preface that lets you know what the record is going to encompass. The record starts with \'One Minute You\'re Here\' and then ends with \'I\'ll See You in My Dreams,\' which are both songs about mortality and death. It was just sort of a little tip of the hat to where the record was going to go and a little slightly connected to \[2019\'s\] *Western Stars*. It was a little transitional piece of music.” **Last Man Standing** “That particular song was directly due to George\'s passing and me finding out that out of that group of people, I\'m kind of here on my own, honoring the guys that I learned my craft with between the ages of 14 and 17 or 18. Those were some of the deepest learning years of my life—learning how to be onstage, learning how to write, learning how to front the band, learning how to put together a show, learning how to play for all different kinds of audiences at fireman\'s fairs, at union halls, at CYO \[Catholic Youth Organization\] dances, and just really honing your craft.” **Janey Needs a Shooter** and **If I Was the Priest** and **Song for Orphans** “We were working on a lot of stuff that I have in the vault to put out again at some time, and I went through almost a whole record of pre-*Greetings From Asbury Park* music that was all acoustic, and these songs were inside them. The guys came in and I said, ‘Okay. Today we\'re going to record songs that are 50 years old, and we\'re going to see what happens.\' The modern band playing those ideas that I had as a 22-year-old—and for some reason it just fit on the record, because the record skips through time. It starts with me thinking about when I was 14 and 15, and then it moves into the present. So those songs added a little touchstone for that certain period of time. I went back and I found a voice that really fit them, and they\'re a nice addition to the record.” **House of a Thousand Guitars** “Every piece of music has its demands—what tone in my voice is going to feel right for this particular piece of music—and you try to meet it in the middle. That\'s one of my favorite songs on the record; I\'m not exactly sure why yet. It\'s at the center of the record and it speaks to this world that the band and I have attempted to create with its values, its ideas, its codes, since we started. And it collects all of that into one piece of music, into this imaginary house of a thousand guitars.” **The Power of Prayer** “I grew up Catholic, and that was enough to turn me off from religion forever. And I realized as I grew older that you can run away from your religion, but you can\'t really run away from your faith. And so I carried a lot of the language with me, which I use and write with quite often—\'Promised Land\' or \'House of a Thousand Guitars\' and \'The Power of Prayer\' on this record. Those little three-minute records and the 180-second character studies that came through pop music were like these little meditations and little prayers for me. And that\'s what I turned them into. And my faith came in and filled those songs, and gave them a spiritual dimension. It\'s an essential part of your life.” **I’ll See You in My Dreams** “I remember a lot of my dreams and I always have. But that song was basically about those that pass away don\'t ever really leave us. They visit me in my dreams several times a year. Clarence will come up a couple times in a year. Or I\'ll see Danny. They just show up in very absurd, sometimes in abstract ways in the middle of strange stories. But they\'re there, and it\'s actually a lovely thing to revisit with them in that way. The pain slips away, the love remains, and they live in that love and walk alongside you and your ancestors and your life companions as a part of your spirit. So the song is basically about that: \'Hey. I\'m not going to see you at the next session, but I\'ll see you in my dreams.\'”
A lump forms in the back of your throat at the beginning of Chris Stapleton’s exquisite fourth album, and basically hovers there until the final strum. It isn’t that there are bombshell moments about his afflictions or personal tragedies; he’s just singing about the small ways life catches him by surprise. But it’s the *way* he does it—sentimental and observant, like a misty-eyed gentle giant—that makes even his simplest songs overwhelmingly emotional to listen to. By making everyday stories feel weighty and profound—the temptation of a highway, the sting of getting older, the yearning for a better life—he teases tangled, complex emotions right up to the surface. Here, guilt, wonder, disappointment, and hope feel as clear as joy and pain. *Starting Over* traces a period of intense self-reflection. After a string of hugely successful albums and high-profile collaborations (Justin Timberlake, John Mayer), Stapleton had reached a level of fame that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. He moved his family out of Nashville and tried to mix things up, briefly trading RCA Studio A for Muscle Shoals. In the end, the LP was recorded in both places, with added support from Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. They helped him assemble hard-rocking stompers like “Arkansas,” about road-tripping through the Ozarks, and “Watch You Burn,” a pointed song about the 2017 mass shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas. Among the album\'s three covers are “Old Friends” and “Worry B Gone” by Guy Clark and John Fogerty’s “Joy of My Life.” But Stapleton just hits different when he’s singing Stapleton. Maybe it’s his devastatingly specific lyrics, recalling, in “Maggie’s Song,” how the family dog placed her head on his hands before passing away (there’s that lump). Or perhaps it’s the way he makes sweeping observations about ineffable things like love and America and still manages to strike a nerve. “I’m 40 years old and it looks like the end of the rainbow/Ain’t no pot of gold,” he sings on “When I’m With You,” a slow-burning song to his wife and singing partner Morgane Stapleton. The album’s final number, a graceful farewell to Nashville, captures the way that cities inevitably let you down. “You build me up, you set me free/You tore down my memories,” he sings with the heartache of someone leaving a first love. “You’re not who you used to be/So long, Nashville, Tennessee.”
On their third release, Colony House unleashes a genuine and life-affirming statement that uses storytelling to cope with their insecurities. Singing about a runaway who’s on the move, the Nashville four-piece narrates bite-sized stories using spiritual themes and natural imagery. Songs like the title track and “Why Even Try” reveal the band’s hopes and fears, offering moments of true uplift over soaring, harmonized choruses and high-energy guitars. But the underlying narrative that drives the album is more personal—the bookends “Looking for Some Light” and “The Hope Inside” also suggest the challenges they faced after parting ways with their former label after releasing 2017’s *Only the Lonely*. But rather than admit defeat, the band embraces that period of transition with a positive attitude on “Trying”—and open to the freedom that it provides.
You don’t need to know that Fiona Apple recorded her fifth album herself in her Los Angeles home in order to recognize its handmade clatter, right down to the dogs barking in the background at the end of the title track. Nor do you need to have spent weeks cooped up in your own home in the middle of a global pandemic in order to more acutely appreciate its distinct banging-on-the-walls energy. But it certainly doesn’t hurt. Made over the course of eight years, *Fetch the Bolt Cutters* could not possibly have anticipated the disjointed, anxious, agoraphobic moment in history in which it was released, but it provides an apt and welcome soundtrack nonetheless. Still present, particularly on opener “I Want You to Love Me,” are Apple’s piano playing and stark (and, in at least one instance, literal) diary-entry lyrics. But where previous albums had lush flourishes, the frenetic, woozy rhythm section is the dominant force and mood-setter here, courtesy of drummer Amy Wood and former Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg. The sparse “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is backed by drumsticks seemingly smacking whatever surface might be in sight. “Relay” (featuring a refrain, “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch,” that Apple claims was excavated from an old journal from written she was 15) is driven almost entirely by drums that are at turns childlike and martial. None of this percussive racket blunts or distracts from Apple’s wit and rage. There are instantly indelible lines (“Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up” and the show-stopping “Good morning, good morning/You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”), all in the service of channeling an entire society’s worth of frustration and fluster into a unique, urgent work of art that refuses to sacrifice playfulness for preaching.
“Basically, we approached every single song with the intention of making sure that Chester would be proud of it,” Grey Daze drummer and co-lyricist Sean Dowdell tells Apple Music about *Amends*, which captures beloved late Linkin Park vocalist Chester Bennington in his first proper band. Originally recorded in the ’90s when Bennington was 18, *Amends* sees the surviving members of Grey Daze—plus new guitarist Cristin Davis—re-recording all their instruments to rebuild these lost songs around the singer’s original performances. Bennington had announced Grey Daze’s revival and started working on the album prior to his death by suicide in 2017. Dowdell, Davis, and original bassist Mace Beyers spent two and a half years meticulously finishing the project—a testament to their dedication, and to Bennington’s immense talent, that features guest shots from famous friends (guitarists from Korn, Bush, and Helmet, among others) as well as family members. “You’re going to get an insight into who Chester was before Linkin Park,” Dowdell says. “And a showcase of how great a singer he really was.” Below, Dowdell discusses each song on *Amends*. **Sickness** “Page Hamilton \[of Helmet\] and Chester were good friends, so we brought him in to play on this track. When I look back and read the lyrics, I can\'t help but think that this song is about addiction. We did a bunch of interviews when Chester was alive, and I heard Chester tell the story of why he wrote the lyrics the way he did—about being a malcontent, about being empty. But when I read them, I think there\'s a subplot in there about addiction.” **Sometimes** “Chris Traynor from Bush is playing guitar on this song with Cristin. Lyrically, Chester wrote this song all by himself. I think he had just broken up with a girlfriend because he had found out that she was cheating on him with one of his best friends at the time. He was just really disappointed in the way it turned out, because he felt like he lost a really good friend *and* his girlfriend. I remember he just walked into the studio, grabbed the microphone, and started screaming the chorus of what would become ‘Sometimes.’ It came together so quickly.” **What’s in the Eye** “Chris Traynor is also on this one, and so is Marcos Curiel from P.O.D. Chester and I wrote almost all the lyrics together, and this is one that I started and brought to practice. I remember Chester grabbed my notepad and put a big X through my chorus—I still actually have the lyric sheet—and then he starts screaming, ‘Don\'t go too fast, my friend!’ He had lost a friend in a car accident a week or two before we wrote the track, so he adapted the lyrics to the loss of his friend. The meaning of the song was really up in the air until Chester gave it literal meaning with a really strong chorus.” **The Syndrome** “This is a song that my son Carston plays drums on, and Carah Faye sings backing vocals. It’s about how sometimes people disappoint you and you just need something different to make you realize that what you thought was important or people who you thought were important really weren’t in the big picture. It’s a similar theme to ‘Sometimes,’ but kind of a different perspective based on moving past a situation—and then you can look back and see things a little more clearly.” **In Time** “Ryan Shuck, who was a good friend of Chester and myself, plays guest guitar on this song. He was in Orgy and in a band called Dead By Sunrise with Chester. I have an incredible memory of sitting with Chester as we were working on the melodies for this song. I was sitting on a couch in our rehearsal studio and I was kind of mouthing this word to him: ‘pain.’ And he stands up, grabs the mic, and screams the lyric as loud as he possibly could. And all of a sudden it really came alive. He was literally feeling that lyric—you can hear it in his voice. It’s an unbelievable performance, and it’s one of the tracks where I think you get an insight into the beauty of Chester’s vocal range and ability. This is one of the songs I get to sing with him on, which was always very difficult because you can’t help but pale in comparison.” **Just Like Heroin** “Back in the ’90s, we were losing guys like Kurt Cobain and Shannon Hoon and Brad \[Nowell\] from Sublime. It all seemed to be from heroin, and it was bumming us out. One of the lyrics in that song that\'ll help you kind of understand where we were coming from is ‘Just excuses.’ It seemed like these guys were just using excuse after excuse to keep using heroin. We kept losing our idols because of that, and it sucked. Chris Traynor plays on this one as well, and it’s one of my favorite tracks on the record.” **B12** “The guest guitar players on this song are Head and Munky from Korn, who were a pleasure to work with. You couldn’t pick a more relevant song as far as the state of the world right now, and it was written 20 years ago. Chester wrote 100 percent of the lyrics on this one, and it’s about the chaotic system we live in. He’s talking about governments crumbling, overbearing SWAT teams, and all the shit that’s happening around us. It’s got that angst that you know and love Chester for. You can hear it in his voice.” **Soul Song** “Chester’s son Jaime sings backing vocals on this, and it’s my favorite song on the record. You can hear Jaime singing on the chorus with his dad, and that’s something that us as a band were able to give back to Chester. He was never able to record anything with his children, and we were able to do that for him. It’s pretty intimidating to go in and sing along with Chester—yeah, he’s your dad, but he’s also Chester Bennington—but Jaime did a great job. I think his dad would be very proud of him.” **Morei Sky** “The chorus of this song says, ‘If I had a second chance I’d make amends, only to find myself losing in the end.’ As we were trying to find an album title, Cristin suggested *Amends* because of this lyric. Right when he said it, I knew that was it. There’s so much duality to that term with the events that transpired in losing Chester that it really just fits. A lot of people ask, ‘Is it you guys trying to make amends with Chester?’ No, it’s Chester making amends with the listener, because I really believe he regretted the decision to take his life the moment he did it. I think if he would’ve woken up the next day, he would’ve called me and said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.’” **She Shines** “The guest guitar players on this are Head from Korn and Jasen Rauch from Breaking Benjamin. Chester wrote the lyrics about his girlfriend telling him that she was leaving him to be with somebody else. I remember we all went on a camping trip up in Flagstaff, Arizona, and she told him in the middle of the trip that she was going to have a new boyfriend and it wasn’t going to be him. He just wrote word for word pretty much what happened in that conversation. So it’s got a lot of emotional torment, but that’s one of the gifts Chester had, if you can call it a gift: the ability to take that raw nerve emotion and pain and express it in a song.” **Shouting Out** “The guest vocalist on this is Laura ‘LP’ Pergolizzi. I remember taking a drive with Chester—he was the worst driver on the planet—and he wanted to play me this new song he had just heard from this girl named LP. This would’ve been 2016, and the song was called ‘Lost on You.’ He was so animated and jumping all over the car about how great her voice was. We knew we wanted a female vocalist on this track, so we reached out to her and she said yes right away. She does an amazing job. To me, the lyrics kind of sum up the idea that Chester never felt he was deserving of other people’s love. It breaks my heart, because so many people thought he was incredible, but he didn’t feel that way about himself. In my opinion, that’s the best way to sum up the tragedy of what happened: He just never loved himself.”
*J Balvin: “I always want to be a step ahead, and I think \[Spatial\] is one of those steps. Everything in the music is going to sound bigger. I think fans will really love this new experience.”* “What we’d do was we’d play the song and close our eyes, and each one of us would name the color that the song made us feel,” Colombian superstar J Balvin tells Apple Music about how he assembled his sixth solo album, whittling it down from roughly 40 potential tracks. “The color that prevailed, that was the song’s name.” Indeed, when the deliberately austere single “Blanco” first dropped last year, few could’ve anticipated it would mark the beginning of a veritable rainbow’s worth of new thematic fare, even after he named his 2019 tour Arcoiris—literally “rainbow” in Spanish. “This is practically an album of all J Balvin; it’s not a collaboration album,” he says. Where his prior projects found him paired up with everyone from Daddy Yankee and Farruko to Pharrell to ROSALÍA, this follow-up to the beloved 2019 Bad Bunny duets set *OASIS* finds him looking inward more than reaching out. At a time when so many eyes globally are fixed upon him, thanks in no small part to successful musical partnerships with artists outside of the Latin music world like the Black Eyed Peas and DJ Snake, *Colores* finds him shutting out the world while engaged in a grand creative exercise with a tight circle of producers, including his longtime studio familiar Sky Rompiendo. The neo-psychedelic floral stylings of modern pop art mastermind Takashi Murakami complement these ten vibrant dembow variations, assigning moods to an array of sonic hues, each made even more vivid and crisp through Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos. Furthering that message, each song has a dedicated music video directed by Colin Tilley that showcases experimental fantasias built from each part of the album’s palette. For those who’ve come to see Balvin as the face and the voice of contemporary reggaetón, *Colores* proves that, in the right hands, the genre has limitless artistic potential. Below, he breaks down each of the tracks for Apple Music. **Amarillo** “Yellow was what 80% of the people who listened to this one felt. Produced by DJ Snake and Afro Bros, it’s very energetic and made for discos. It says that I don’t complicate my life. Many people know J Balvin, but few people know about José, and the thing is that I don’t complicate myself. Let’s enjoy it. That’s why it’s the first song of the album, because as soon as people listen to it, I want them to feel connected with the color and with the song’s power.” **Azul** “We closed our eyes as a work team and the color blue prevailed. This was produced by Sky, and Justin Quiles worked with us. It’s a very refreshing song, one where we talk about a woman who lives her life the way she wants—independently. She does things her way and she can’t be controlled.” **Rojo** “The lyrics here really guided us towards passion, towards love. It had been a while since I last made a romantic reggaetón song. The lyrics say, ‘I choose you.’ When you love, you love freely, and you need to let the other person be happy. The part I like the most says, ‘They try, and they fail. They always want to buy you with money, but that treasure has its pirates. I’ll do anything for you.’ It means no matter how much they want to buy you, your heart belongs to me.” **Rosa** “This is produced by Diplo. We had a fantastic time making the song, which has a very sensual vibe. With this song, you can’t tell a woman how much you like her, and you don\'t know what to do when you are in front of her. Again, I am alone, as you can see, like with 90% of *Colores*.” **Morado** “I’d been wanting to release a classic reggaetón song for a long time, J Balvin-style. When we closed our eyes, we connected with the color purple. And when we thought of purple, we thought about royalty, the castle vibe, the king vibe. The lyrics are very funny: ‘I asked for a drink, and she asked for the bottle. She always goes too far when I’m with her. Listen to her, or else you’ll crash, yes. If there’s any problem, it’s her fault. Dance so that her butt bounces, done.’” **Verde** “There are only two collaborations in the album, and this is a very special one because it’s with my brother and right hand in music, Sky. For the first time, he shows himself as an artist. Apart from being a great producer and composer, he also raps and sings very well. This is pure 100% reggaetón. It’s made to jump, to actually jump. It’s telling people to check out the swag or the flow of everybody.” **Negro** “This is one of my favorite songs on *Colores* because it has *malianteo*, the flavor that made me fall in love with reggaetón. It reminds me of the days of Hector El Father; it makes you want to grab a bat and head out to the streets. The lyrics are brutal. The color and what the song inspires are brutal. Dee Mad made a beat that really hit it.” **Gris** “Gray was the predominant color in the voting for this one. The lyrics are about when you try to be the best for your partner, yet they don’t see any value in it. They don’t stop judging you for the mistakes you made in the past.” **Arcoíris** “This is called ‘Arcoíris’ (rainbow) because it was the song that changes the rhythm the most. The producer is Michael Brun from Haiti again, a collaboration alongside Mr Eazi of Nigeria. He samples a Cuban song by Compay Segundo. It sounds a lot like Africa, but it has a lot of our Latin flavor. We combine all colors into the rhythm, so to speak. I\'m an Afrobeats fan, and we worked with Mr Eazi in the past on *OASIS*.” **Blanco** “This was the first song that was released from the album. When everything was sounding very similar, I decided to go another way. It talks about my city Medellín, and was produced by Sky. It is different from what was happening outside. For real, made in Medellín.
Highway Angels...Full Moon Rain, a newly remastered album by singer-songwriter Jimmy LaFave. Recorded at Charlie Hollis’ studio MARS (Mid Austin Recording Service) in Austin, Texas between December 1987 – June 1988, Highway Angels...Full Moon Rain brought together an exceptional group of collaborators – Gene Williams on acoustic guitar, 12 string guitar and bass; Larry Wilson on acoustic guitar, slide guitar and bass; Tito Walsh on fretless bass; Charlie Hollis (recorded albums for the likes of Jimmy LaFave, Bob Childers, Randy Crouch and Brad Piccolo of the Red Dirt Rangers) on bass; Carey Kemper on mandolin and violin; Beth Galiger (Slim Richey, George Ensle) on flute; and James Suarez on cymbal. This album represents LaFave’s artistry as what famed music journalist Dave Marsh hails as “one of America’s greatest voices.” LaFave’s self-produced tape Highway Angels...Full Moon Rain won the Austin Chronicle Reader’s Poll Tape of the Year Award in 1988. The album includes LaFave’s longtime fan favorites “One Angel Is You” (Only One Angel) and “Deep South 61 Delta Highway Blues.” These are some of the tracks that reflect the depth and extensiveness of his earlier acoustic, “rootsy” musical interpretations. In addition to original versions of songs he later recorded for Austin Skyline and Highway Trance, “The Price of Love” and “Is It Still Raining” offer powerful and inspiring emotional elements that are hallmarks of his earlier writings. LaFave’s affection for other musical artists from Oklahoma – where his family moved from Texas in his high school years and Jimmy began performing and recording – is also heard on the album in his version of Bob Childers’ “The Lone Wolf.” All told, Highway Angels...Full Moon Rain celebrates what All Music says was “the way he blended country, blues, folk, and early rock & roll. His work ethic, his low-key rapport with fans were all factors that worked in his favor.” And he gave everything he recorded, as All Music also observed, “a stamp that is indelible. It’s tattooed on the inside, on the heart where it belongs.”
“When I moved to Nashville, I had yet to really travel and see the world,” singer-songwriter Kip Moore tells Apple Music. “Even though I had a burning desire to, I was limited in my own experiences.” He involved himself in every facet of how his music’s made and presented all along, but started giving expression to his deeper yearnings and sense of wanderlust as he trekked across the globe either performing for crowds or getting away from it all. “I think I was gaining confidence through the years in my own abilities, and believing more and more my own voice and what I had to say.” The songs on Moore’s fourth album—all but one of which he co-wrote and produced on his own—harness unsettled emotions that more happy-go-lucky hitmakers probably wouldn’t touch. “I\'ve been carrying around certain pieces of regret,” he says. “There\'s been old bones that I\'ve dug holes for, that I\'ve suppressed. I think that all those things I started kind of rehashing—the desire to be alone, and find simplicity and joy, those kinds of things.” Here he tells the stories behind each track on *Wild World*. **Janie Blu** “I think that we always have people that we had super close bonds with in life. The regret begins with knowing that you didn\'t give that person everything they deserve, and that you should have, and that you could have. As heart-wrenching as that song is, we wanted to put this dreamlike melody on top of it, to kind of play a trick on you, where if you would have heard it in another language, you would never know that it\'s that heavy of a song. That\'s one guitar take, and we loved the flaws that happen in there. That was beautiful playing by Dave Nassie, my guitar player.” **Southpaw** “I\'ve always felt like a bit of an outsider, but I woke up really feeling like I was on the outside that morning, and feeling alone in that sense of ‘I\'m not supposed to be here right now. I don\'t know how we got here.’ I feel like we are truly in the middle of a generation that all we do is complain the minute things aren\'t going our way. I can\'t relate to those kinds of things. I was a boxing fan growing up, and a southpaw was always a very rare sighting, an unusual fighter, and you couldn\'t prepare for him. I just did the whole thing as a metaphor for that.” **Fire and Flame** “I\'m constantly in a state of searching for that elusive joy and peace. You get it for fleeting moments, and then you don\'t have it. And when you are searching, you are going to get burned sometimes. For me, it was more of trying to figure out where I fit in the whole spiritual realm, and what God looks like to me. I\'ve always had my faith, and I\'ve never shied away from that. But I always push it away. Even knowing that about myself, knowing that that\'s where I find the most peace, I still run back into the world. That\'s the whole line of ‘He took my hand and I shook it free.’\" **Wild World** “My dad was the king of one-liners. My mom was a lot more long-form—she would break down a whole story for you. But they were both very encouraging, in the sense of encouraging me to do my own walk, to stay my own man: ‘Don\'t let the world try to tell you what\'s the right way to go, but figure it out on your own, and trust in that, and trust in yourself, and keep that wild spirit about you.’ They were always telling me that there\'s not one way to do this life. We\'re all programmed from the day we\'re born: You go about these steps. You go to school, then you have a baby, then you get married, and you go to college. You get a house, and you get a dog. We\'re constantly pressing that upon each other. They never did that with me. And that\'s a lot more of what that song is saying, is go about life on your terms.” **Red White Blue Jean American Dream** “That song was initially recorded very folky, and then we ended up stripping it back down to the nuts and bolts and changing up the phrasing a little bit and bringing that old American rock ’n’ roll element to the song. That\'s one of my favorites on the record, and I can\'t wait to play that one live. That song is preaching the simplicities in life, and longing for the right things.” **She’s Mine** “I wrote it years ago, but the first couple times I tried to record it, we smoothed out the edges too much. It just always felt a little vanilla, and it wasn\'t hitting right. So I stepped away from it for years, and I came back to it and kind of figured out what I wanted that opening riff to be, and started working it up with the band, and it finally came to life. It\'s pretty straightforward. I wrote it from a sense of when I first started touring, and understanding now that my life was completely different, flipped upside down, and everything in my life was coming at me from different angles. I was also aware that relationships are going to come from a different place now too, and I\'m going to meet so many different kinds of people.” **Hey Old Lover** “‘Hey Old Lover’ was one of those things where it just spontaneously fell out in a fun way. Dan Couch and I were actually writing another song, and then I started ripping around on that riff. It wasn\'t like we were specifically thinking about anything in particular; those opening lines of the chorus kind of fell out. Then it just became that songwriting process of trying to be clever and fun with the song and writing around the initial feeling that we had.” **Grow on You** “That song started with the music and the chorus, and I was riffing around on that melody. And I was spouting out different lines from the chorus, but they weren\'t quite put together. I\'m telling them an old story about how it took a little time with somebody, and sometimes you just got to hang in there. Then Westin Davis pieced together some things that I was saying. When he said, ‘Like an ivy up a hickory down in muddy Mississippi,’ we all were just like, ‘Man, what a hooky piece of phrasing right there.’” **More Than Enough** “I can remember I stepped outside and came up with that line ‘If Uncle Sam goes and steals my money, I\'m good with a spoonful of your sweet honey.’ It was just kind of a thing of, at the end of the day, I know that you can\'t take any of this with you. Sometimes I get worried about that, because I\'ve finally made a little something for myself, and I understand that at any time, banks could crash and this and that. There\'s going to always be something to be scared of. I truly believe that if you have the things that you truly care about around you, you\'re going to be able to figure things out. But I was in such a search at that time to stay as grounded as I could and find a way to get back to that way of living.” **Sweet Virginia** “What I wanted people to get from this song is, so often we\'re so unclear. I think now more than ever, it\'s like everyone\'s scared to put their cards on the table. I feel like when you listen to stories of your grandparents and even your parents, everything was a lot more direct in those times. Now everything seems to be more of a game. A lot of times you might be feeling something strongly, but there seems to be someone not having clarity on one side or the other.” **South** “We literally came up with that entire foundation that you hear in that song in about a total of 10 minutes in a sound check. Those are the kind of moments, personally, that I live for. I didn\'t dream about being an artist; I dreamed about being in a band. I wanted to be in the Heartbreakers as a kid. So for me, those are the magical moments, more than even writing in a room with another writer. And it was, we were all kind of looking at each other. ‘South’ was one of those songs where we rehearsed that thing 90 million times before we went in and recorded it, because we wanted it to be one long take, and no cut and splice. There\'s a lot of space in that song, and everybody\'s part had a place. We spent forever working at that outro, to make it this one big exploding thing at the end.” **Crazy for You Tonight** “I\'ve always tried to remain authentic with myself when writing those kinds of songs. There\'s a very specific line: ‘I don\'t care what your friends are saying/And to tell the truth, girl, they might be right.’ I try to present my own flaws, but there\'s still a sense of confidence throughout the song, because that\'s truly how I feel. So that\'s what\'s neat about a song like that.” **Payin’ Hard** “I was really close with my dad growing up—very, very close. And there\'s been a big void since he\'s been gone, and a lot of regret. It was hard to navigate early in my career; when he was dying is when all my success was starting to happen. I\'d try to go see him when I thought that I could, for two or three days, and then I\'d go back out on the road, feeling like promoters might write me off if I cancel these big dates that I had already signed up for. I\'ve carried that regret for years, of how my guitar has been the thing that I\'ve just constantly gone to, and I\'ve neglected all these other important areas of my life—relationships, friendships, these kinds of things that have suffered because of being gone so much. So I think that song was digging up bones, and facing them, and trying to find a way to put it to rest and forgive myself.”
“I had never seen myself as an activist-artist,” Mickey Guyton tells Apple Music. “I was just trying to be like every other woman in country music: I just can write and sing cool songs and get recognized for it and move forward.” Since the early 2010s, the Texas-bred country-pop performer had been striving to build a Nashville career as an expressive vocalist and the sole Black woman signed to a major country label, in an industry that she came to recognize offered little room for either. “Seeing that it\'s still so hard for women in country music—you can look at the charts now—it\'s just been that much more important for me to write with women, push for women, push for what is right, and to sing about what is right,” she says. By early 2020, Guyton had found trusted collaborators, like her co-writers Victoria Banks and Emma-Lee and writer-producer Karen Kosowski, and figured out how she wanted to put her voice to use. “I was on my way to putting out this material,” she explains, “but the crazy thing is, with the turn of events and the social unrest and the pandemic, it actually inspired me that much more. I was already writing on social issues and life issues, and this just helped continue that conversation.” Guyton wrote and recorded the remainder of her six-song EP virtually, while holed up with her husband in their LA home, and here she tells the stories behind each track on *Bridges*. **Heaven Down Here** “I had watched the video of George Floyd. Then I saw the video of Ahmaud Arbery running in the streets and these men hunting him down. Just treating them so inhumanely and like they don\'t matter, like they\'re disposable. And Breonna Taylor. I\'m a very empathetic person. I didn\'t even want to write that day because I was so emotional. I was writing with some of the most amazing songwriters in Nashville—Josh Kear, Gordie Sampson, and Hillary Lindsey. We wrote the song on Zoom. I looked at these sweet faces that were taking the time to write with me, and I just started sobbing. Being in country music, I didn\'t feel like I mattered. We were like, ‘How do we write this in a way that\'s not just devastating? How do we make this to where people can hear it and receive it?’ We were like, ‘What if we\'re asking God, \"If you\'re listening, if you hear anything we\'re saying, can you help us out?\"\'” **Bridges** “That is Karen Kosowski and Emma-Lee and Victoria Banks, the magic of those women. I came up with the concept: ‘Y\'all, instead of tearing everything down, what if we built bridges and started reaching out for the other side?’ Oh my god, it gets so frustrating watching the news. I can\'t even. But that was the motivation for me, because I was watching all of this. I wanted to sing a song like ‘Build That Bridge.’ I said, ‘It needs to be tempo, and there needs to be angst.’” **What Are You Gonna Tell Her?** “I had a conversation on Instagram with a girl from the Philippines. She was trying to decide if she wanted to actually sing or if she wanted to work in the music industry. She asked me, ‘Is there anything I have to look forward to? Do you think I have a shot?’ I just had to be honest. I didn\'t have anything really too great to tell her about the industry. Then she told me that her musical director in one of the school plays that she was in told her that she needed to get whiter makeup so she would look whiter on stage. How do you tell that to somebody, to a girl with hopes? It reminded me of myself, what I\'ve gone through and how I\'ve tried to alter myself to make other people comfortable with me being present and making sure I can fit in and they can see me. It was like PTSD. I\'m being dramatic, but I felt that I instantly wanted to fight for her.” **Rosé** “I wrote that song two and a half years ago because I was like, ‘Women don\'t really have drinking country songs. Well then, why don\'t we have our own?’ I cannot believe that nobody had ever written a drinking country song called ‘Rosé All Day.’” **Salt** “There\'s always male-bashing songs, but I wanted it to be like a cautionary tale to men. Like, ‘Look, there\'s a lot of pretty women out there, but you got to remember what you got at home.’ I think that\'s something that so many women relate to. We\'re sitting at home, and I trust my man, but I can\'t imagine being a wife of a lot of these producers that are around all these cute women all the time. That would drive me nuts.” **Black Like Me** “I had been in this town for a long time. I\'ve felt overlooked for a long time. I felt unconsidered for a long time. I was showing up for other artists, but nobody would ever show up for me. It was really hard. That reminded me of my life growing up. I was always the only Black girl in spaces. I always felt a little like I didn\'t fit in. I was called the N-word, as a child. I wanted to save that song for last, because that is the song that is the most important to me. Telling my experience through country storytelling, I think, was one of the most beautiful things. Country music started with Black people, and this song, to me, bridged that gap.”
Some years you have to wonder how Public Enemy sustains such righteous indignation. Others—let’s say 2020, just for example—you wonder why everyone isn’t as angry as they are. That they have strong thoughts on the 45th president of the United States isn’t surprising (“State of the Union”), nor is their crusade to uphold old-school values about hip-hop and art in a frictionless digital world (“Public Enemy Number Won,” “Toxic,” the Ice-T-featuring “Smash the Crowd”). The surprise is how vital, engaged, and unflinchingly on message Chuck D and Flavor Flav sound this side of their 60th birthdays, and on their prodigal return to Def Jam. If you think YG’s line “Pull the trigger, kill a negro/He\'s a hero” on the revamp of “Fight the Power” sounds hyperbolic, remember George Zimmerman and welcome to Kyle Rittenhouse. Breonna Taylor is mentioned, but because systemic racism comes in many forms and flavors, so are Craig Hodges and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. And if PE\'s politics seem preoccupying, listen to “R.I.P. Blackat”—their feelings about friends are just as strong. Yes, they’ve been confronting us with the same stark reality for more than three decades. But that’s not their fault, it’s the world’s. And that’s the double-truth, Ruth.
Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"
For every copy of Steep Canyon Rangers' Arm in Arm sold (up to 2,000 albums), Wicked Weed Brewing will be donating $10 to Haywood Street's Downtown Welcome Table, an Asheville, NC-based organization that provides a fine dining experience meant to counter the notion often held by those living on the streets that "handouts, hand-me downs, and leftovers are all I deserve." Whatever you call it – history, collective consciousness, experience – the Steep Canyon Rangers have a lot of it. As kids, they grew up listening to the rock, Americana, jazz, and blues that would one day inspire them to pick up instruments and make music of their own. A few years later they were young men on university campuses, playing bluegrass together at house parties and college bars. Now, after two decades as a band, they’re grown men with families, touring the world as GRAMMY Award-winning musicians, famous for high-powered live shows. Their new record, Arm in Arm, is an homage of sorts, both to the early influences that first sparked their dreams of playing music as well as the bluegrass tradition that initially carried them. It’s also an homage to the relationships that have borne the Steep Canyon Rangers to this moment, where their music is reflective of exactly who they are as artists, performers, collaborators, and friends. It’s funny to hear a GRAMMY Award-winning band that’s been together for over twenty years and inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame talk about new possibilities, but age has a way of making things feel new, and the vibe on Arm in Arm feels new, but is it? The music is certainly a departure from the band’s earliest days of wearing suits, picking and grinning around a single microphone, but perhaps it’s also a return to the even earlier days when these men were young kids influenced by the sounds of electric guitars and skull-rattling drums. The music on Arm in Arm is brand new, but maybe it’s old. It’s expansive, evolutionary, and fresh, which is to say it’s pure and original. Whatever you call it, this is the best music the Steep Canyon Rangers have ever made.
A mere 11 months passed between the release of *Lover* and its surprise follow-up, but it feels like a lifetime. Written and recorded remotely during the first few months of the global pandemic, *folklore* finds the 30-year-old singer-songwriter teaming up with The National’s Aaron Dessner and longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff for a set of ruminative and relatively lo-fi bedroom pop that’s worlds away from its predecessor. When Swift opens “the 1”—a sly hybrid of plaintive piano and her naturally bouncy delivery—with “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit,” you’d be forgiven for thinking it was another update from quarantine, or a comment on her broadening sensibilities. But Swift’s channeled her considerable energies into writing songs here that double as short stories and character studies, from Proustian flashbacks (“cardigan,” which bears shades of Lana Del Rey) to outcast widows (“the last great american dynasty”) and doomed relationships (“exile,” a heavy-hearted duet with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon). It’s a work of great texture and imagination. “Your braids like a pattern/Love you to the moon and to Saturn,” she sings on “seven,” the tale of two friends plotting an escape. “Passed down like folk songs, the love lasts so long.” For a songwriter who has mined such rich detail from a life lived largely in public, it only makes sense that she’d eventually find inspiration in isolation.
The times have finally caught up with The Chicks. With *Gaslighter*, their first album in 14 years, the country trio formerly known as the Dixie Chicks seem to have met their moment in the current activist climate. It’s been 17 years since outspoken lead singer Natalie Maines, along with sisters Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire, brazenly risked alienating a large chunk of their audience—and lost the support of the country music industry—when she railed against George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq (controversial opinions at the time, especially for their conservative fanbase). Their last LP, 2006’s *Taking the Long Way*, doubled down on the politics, winning them an armful of Grammys but little notice from Nashville. Now paired with pop producer Jack Antonoff (Taylor Swift, Lorde) and a who’s who of superstar songwriters (Justin Tranter, Julia Michaels, Teddy Geiger), The Chicks are still not ready to make nice. The incendiary opening title track is a trademark Chicks kiss-off that could as easily be addressing a jealous ex as the current US president. “March March” was inspired by a political rally that all three Chicks attended with their families, but its timely video draws a natural parallel between the song’s broad self-empowerment message and this year’s Black Lives Matter protests. The rest of the album maintains the personal-is-political bent, with universal messages of hope and self-help addressed autobiographically to the band member’s children (“Young Man,” “Julianna Calm Down”), their ex-husbands (“Tights on My Boat,” “Hope It’s Something Good”), and even themselves (“For Her”). “We were always thinking and writing about that stuff,” Strayer tells Apple Music, “but the news kind of caught up to what we were already talking about—whether it was the #MeToo movement or what\'s happening right now with Black Lives Matter. So it was coincidental in a way, but I think those things are cyclical. They might be the newest news stories, but they’ve always been here.” The Chicks spoke to Apple Music and reflected on the making of the album and the inspirations behind a few of the album\'s most memorable songs. **Gaslighter** Natalie Maines: “That was the first song we wrote with Jack Antonoff, who produced the majority of the record. I know I came in with the word ‘gaslighter’ and some lyrics in a notebook and wanted to write about gaslighting, but I\'m sure it was Jack that thought of coming out cold with the chorus.” Martie Maguire: “I remember him loving that word and you having to explain what it meant. I was definitely impressed with him right off the bat. He would start playing and singing that word, and then having us record it. When we went to record it, it took like five minutes.” NM: “And that became the title track just because most Americans didn\'t know what that meant a few years ago. I learned about that in therapy. We never thought of any other title for the album, because it really is a buzzword now because of President Trump. It just seemed like the perfect word and captured this time that we\'re in.” **Texas Man** NM: “Wasn\'t that when Julia Michaels came over here to my house and sat with just like a tape roll? She just has an interesting way of scoring melodies. We\'d just go through a tape, and just let her go. She\'ll go for like half an hour just vamping.” Emily Strayer: “Remember how we did vocals? It\'s literally the smallest closet.” NM: “My coat closet!” MM: “That song is about Natalie. We just wanted to get her groove back. It still hasn\'t happened yet, but maybe that song will bring that energy.” **For Her** ES: “The song is about speaking to your younger self and giving some wisdom. It was written with Ariel Rechtshaid and Sarah Aarons. We were with writers in this room, in this very dark, dingy studio, and I remember just feeling really drained. It was just so tired and gloomy. Wasn\'t it where Michael Jackson recorded *Thriller*? He had this booth built for Bubbles, with a little window. You could just imagine this chimp looking out the window. Sarah was hilarious, just so self-deprecating. She was just a joke a minute, she has such a personality, and her lyrics—it’s different to write with a woman, just to write those kind of female lyrics with another female.” NM: “She was a huge driving force behind those lyrics, for sure. And once she gets going, it\'s like a lyric train that you can\'t stop and you don\'t want to stop. By the time we left that session, we had loads of options, and we kept a lot of her lyrics but changed some as well, just so we could have a part in the song. Sarah Aarons did not need us.” MM: “And she was great writing for Natalie\'s voice, because she has such a strong voice and she can do these acrobatics. Not many people can keep up with Natalie\'s voice and have the same type of inflections.” NM: “But also—and I’m not saying this is what I am but—I loved her soul. She\'s a very soulful singer. It would be interesting to go back and listen to those original recordings, because she made a lot of soul in her voice and her phrasing and I definitely stole some of that.” **March March** NM: “We went to the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., with our kids. It was so impactful for me. That\'s the first time I\'ve ever been in a march that large. And we weren\'t there as performers, we were just in the crowds, with my little girls on my shoulders. We took a lot from that, the energy of it. We didn\'t want it to be about one particular march, so on the verses we talk about different things that are important to us.” ES: “We were always thinking and writing about that stuff, but the news kind of caught up to what we were already talking about—whether it was the #MeToo movement or what\'s happening right now with Black Lives Matter. So it was coincidental in a way, but I do think those things are cyclical. They might be the newest news story, but they\'ve always been there.” NM: “You don\'t need a group around you if you\'re on the right side of history. We wanted to empower people who stand up for what they believe. Unless you believe in racism, then sit down. \[laughs\] Know what\'s right, act on it, speak out, be an army of one; you don\'t need to be a follower or go along with a group if you feel strongly about what\'s right.” **My Best Friend\'s Weddings** ES: “It\'s my wedding—weddings.” NM: “Yeah, everybody kept calling it ‘My Best Friend\'s Wedding,\' and I was like, \'No, *weddings*.\' That one\'s definitely got a lot of personal truths in it. There are three songs—\'My Best Friend\'s Weddings\' was one of them—that we consider the Hawaii songs, that we wrote in mostly Kauai. We spent three weeks in Hawaii all together making this record. We\'d go from the studio to my house, and it was a family vacation for everybody as well. It was a lot of fun, and there\'s songs with ukulele, and if you have headphones, you can hear birds chirping and waves, and a rooster.” **Julianna Calm Down** MM: “I\'ll just say that that was one that Julia wasn\'t sure that she wouldn\'t want for herself, but once we heard it, we pounced on it. Unbeknownst to her, Natalie went home and rewrote all the verses to make them about our closest family, our nieces and our cousins. Originally it was called ‘Julia Come Down’—it\'s her talking about breathing, taking a moment, everything\'s not going to be so bad. But Nat flipped it on its head to make it a song about advice to our girls and our nieces.” NM: “When Jack told her that we had written on it and asked if we could have that song, she was like, ‘Oh yeah, they can have the verses and the bridge. But I\'m going to keep the chorus and rework it.’ And I was just like, \'No, no, no!\' We kind of tricked her out of it.”
“Place and setting have always been really huge in this project,” Katie Crutchfield tells Apple Music of Waxahatchee, which takes its name from a creek in her native Alabama. “It’s always been a big part of the way I write songs, to take people with me to those places.” While previous Waxahatchee releases often evoked a time—the roaring ’90s, and its indie rock—Crutchfield’s fifth LP under the Waxahatchee alias finds Crutchfield finally embracing her roots in sound as well. “Growing up in Birmingham, I always sort of toed the line between having shame about the South and then also having deep love and connection to it,” she says. “As I started to really get into alternative country music and Lucinda \[Williams\], I feel like I accepted that this is actually deeply in my being. This is the music I grew up on—Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, the powerhouse country singers. It’s in my DNA. It’s how I learned to sing. If I just accept and embrace this part of myself, I can make something really powerful and really honest. I feel like I shed a lot of stuff that wasn\'t serving me, both personally and creatively, and it feels like *Saint Cloud*\'s clean and honest. It\'s like this return to form.” Here, Crutchfield draws us a map of *Saint Cloud*, with stories behind the places that inspired its songs—from the Mississippi to the Mediterranean. WEST MEMPHIS, ARKANSAS “Memphis is right between Birmingham and Kansas City, where I live currently. So to drive between the two, you have to go through Memphis, over the Mississippi River, and it\'s epic. That trip brings up all kinds of emotions—it feels sort of romantic and poetic. I was driving over and had this idea for \'**Fire**,\' like a personal pep talk. I recently got sober and there\'s a lot of work I had to do on myself. I thought it would be sweet to have a song written to another person, like a traditional love song, but to have it written from my higher self to my inner child or lower self, the two selves negotiating. I was having that idea right as we were over the river, and the sun was just beating on it and it was just glowing and that lyric came into my head. I wanted to do a little shout-out to West Memphis too because of \[the West Memphis Three\]—that’s an Easter egg and another little layer on the record. I always felt super connected to \[Damien Echols\], watching that movie \[*Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills*\] as a teenager, just being a weird, sort of dark kid from the South. The moment he comes on the screen, I’m immediately just like, ‘Oh my god, that guy is someone I would have been friends with.’ Being a sort of black sheep in the South is especially weird. Maybe that\'s just some self-mythology I have, like it\'s even harder if you\'re from the South. But it binds you together.” BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA “Arkadelphia Road is a real place, a road in Birmingham. It\'s right on the road of this little arts college, and there used to be this gas station where I would buy alcohol when I was younger, so it’s tied to this seediness of my past. A very profound experience happened to me on that road, but out of respect, I shouldn’t give the whole backstory. There is a person in my life who\'s been in my life for a long time, who is still a big part of my life, who is an addict and is in recovery. It got really bad for this person—really, really bad. \[\'**Arkadelphia**\'\] is about when we weren’t in recovery, and an experience that we shared. One of the most intense, personal songs I\'ve ever written. It’s about growing up and being kids and being innocent and watching this whole crazy situation play out while I was also struggling with substances. We now kind of have this shared recovery language, this shared crazy experience, and it\'s one of those things where when we\'re in the same place, we can kind of fit in the corner together and look at the world with this tent, because we\'ve been through what we\'ve been through.” RUBY FALLS, TENNESSEE “It\'s in Chattanooga. A waterfall that\'s in a cave. My sister used to live in Chattanooga, and that drive between Birmingham and Chattanooga, that stretch of land between Alabama, Georgia, into Tennessee, is so meaningful—a lot of my formative time has been spent driving that stretch. You pass a few things. One is Noccalula Falls, which I have a song about on my first album called ‘Noccalula.’ The other is Ruby Falls. \[‘**Ruby Falls**’\] is really dense—there’s a lot going on. It’s about a friend of mine who passed away from a heroin overdose, and it’s for him—my song for all people who struggle with that kind of thing. I sang a song at his funeral when he died. This song is just all about him, about all these different places that we talked about, or that we’d spend so much time at Waxahatchee Creek together. The beginning of the song is sort of meant to be like the high. It starts out in the sky, and that\'s what I\'m describing, as I take flight, up above everybody else. Then the middle part is meant to be like this flashback but it\'s taking place on earth—it’s actually a reference to *Just Kids*, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s written with them in mind, but it\'s just about this infectious, contagious, intimate friendship. And the end of the song is meant to represent death or just being below the surface and being gone, basically.” ST. CLOUD, FLORIDA “It\'s where my dad is from, where he was born and where he grew up. The first part of \[\'**St. Cloud**\'\] is about New York. So I needed a city that was sort of the opposite of New York, in my head. I wasn\'t going to do like middle-of-nowhere somewhere; I really did want it to be a place that felt like a city. But it just wasn’t cosmopolitan. Just anywhere America, and not in a bad way—in a salt-of-the-earth kind of way. As soon as the idea to just call the whole record *Saint Cloud* entered my brain, it didn\'t leave. It had been the name for six months or something, and I had been calling it *Saint Cloud*, but then David Berman died and I was like, ‘Wow, that feels really kismet or something,’ because he changed his middle name to Cloud. He went by David Cloud Berman. I\'m a fan; it feels like a nice way to \[pay tribute\].” BARCELONA, SPAIN “In the beginning of\* \*‘**Oxbow**’ I say ‘Barna in white,’ and ‘Barna’ is what people call Barcelona. And Barcelona is where I quit drinking, so it starts right at the beginning. I like talking about it because when I was really struggling and really trying to get better—and many times before I actually succeeded at that—it was always super helpful for me to read about other musicians and just people I looked up to that were sober. It was during Primavera \[Sound Festival\]. It’s sort of notoriously an insane party. I had been getting close to quitting for a while—like for about a year or two, I would really be not drinking that much and then I would just have a couple nights where it would just be really crazy and I would feel so bad, and it affected all my relationships and how I felt about music and work and everything. I had the most intense bout of that in Barcelona right at the beginning of this tour, and as I was leaving I was going from there to Portugal and I just decided, ‘I\'m just going to not.’ I think in my head I was like, ‘I\'m actually done,’ but I didn\'t say that to everybody. And then that tour went into another tour, and then to the summer, and then before you know it I had been sober six months, and then I was just like, ‘I do not miss that at all.’ I\'ve never felt more like myself and better. It was the site of my great realization.”
