Good Morning America's 50 Best Albums of 2021

“It wasn\'t forced, it wasn\'t pressured, it wasn\'t scary,” Billie Eilish tells Apple Music of making *Happier Than Ever*. “It was nice.” Once again written and recorded entirely with her brother FINNEAS, Eilish’s second LP finds the 19-year-old singer-songwriter in a deeply reflective state, using the first year of the pandemic to process the many ways her life has changed and she’s evolved since so quickly becoming one of the world’s most famous and influential teenagers. “I feel like everything I\'ve created before this, as much as I love it, was kind of a battle with myself,” she says. “I\'ve actually talked to artists that are now going through the rise and what I\'ve said to them is, ‘I know what it\'s like, but I also don\'t know what it\'s like for you.’ Because everybody goes through something completely different.” A noticeable departure from the genre-averse, slightly sinister edge of 2019’s *WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?*, much of the production and arrangements here feel open and airy by comparison, inspired in large part by the placid mid-century pop and jazz of torch singer Julie London. And whether she’s sharing new perspective on age (“Getting Older”), sensuality (“Oxytocin”), or the absurdity of fame (“NDA”), there’s a sense of genuine freedom—if not peace—in Eilish’s singing, her voice able to change shape and size as she sees fit, an instrument under her control and no one else\'s. “I started to feel like a parody of myself, which is super weird,” she says. “I just tried to listen to myself and figure out what I actually liked versus what I thought I would have liked in the past. I had to really evaluate myself and be like, \'What the hell do I want with myself right now?\'” It’s a sign of growth, most striking in the clear skies of “my future” and the emotional clarity of the album’s towering title cut, which starts as a gentle ballad and blossoms, quite naturally and unexpectedly, into a growing wave of distorted guitars and distant screams. Both sound like breakthroughs. “There was no thought of, ‘What\'s this going to be? What track is this?’” she says of the writing process. “We just started writing and we kept writing. Over time, it just literally created itself. It just happened. It was easy.”

“Sometimes I’ll be in my own space, my own company, and that’s when I\'m really content,” Little Simz tells Apple Music. “It\'s all love, though. There’s nothing against anyone else; that\'s just how I am. I like doing my own thing and making my art.” The lockdowns of 2020, then, proved fruitful for the North London MC, singer, and actor. She wrestled writer’s block, revived her cult *Drop* EP series (explore the razor-sharp and diaristic *Drop 6* immediately), and laid grand plans for her fourth studio album. Songwriter/producer Inflo, co-architect of Simz’s 2019 Mercury-nominated, Ivor Novello Award-winning *GREY Area*, was tapped and the hard work began. “It was straight boot camp,” she says of the *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert* sessions in London and Los Angeles. “We got things done pronto, especially with the pace that me and Flo move at. We’re quite impulsive: When we\'re ready to go, it’s time to go.” Months of final touches followed—and a collision between rap and TV royalty. An interest in *The Crown* led Simz to approach Emma Corrin (who gave an award-winning portrayal of Princess Diana in the drama). She uses her Diana accent to offer breathless, regal addresses that punctuate the 19-track album. “It was a reach,” Simz says of inviting Corrin’s participation. “I’m not sure what I expected, but I enjoyed watching her performance, and wrote most of her words whilst I was watching her.” Corrin’s speeches add to the record’s sense of grandeur. It pairs turbocharged UK rap with Simz at her most vulnerable and ambitious. There are meditations on coming of age in the spotlight (“Standing Ovation”), a reunion with fellow Sault collaborator Cleo Sol on the glorious “Woman,” and, in “Point and Kill,” a cleansing, polyrhythmic jam session with Nigerian artist Obongjayar that confirms the record’s dazzling sonic palette. Here, Simz talks us through *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert*, track by track. **“Introvert”** “This was always going to intro the album from the moment it was made. It feels like a battle cry, a rebirth. And with the title, you wouldn\'t expect this to sound so huge. But I’m finding the power within my introversion to breathe new meaning into the word.” **“Woman” (feat. Cleo Sol)** “This was made to uplift and celebrate women. To my peers, my family, my friends, close women in my life, as well as women all over the world: I want them to know I’ve got their back. Linking up with Cleo is always fun; we have such great musical chemistry, and I can’t imagine anyone else bringing what she did to the song. Her voice is beautiful, but I think it\'s her spirit and her intention that comes through when she sings.” **“Two Worlds Apart”** “Firstly, I love this sample; it’s ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’ by Smokey Robinson, and Flo’s chopped it up really cool. This is my moment to flex. You had the opener, followed by a nice, smoother vibe, but this is like, ‘Hey, you’re listening to a *rap* album.’” **“I Love You, I Hate You”** “This wasn’t the easiest song for me to write, but I\'m super proud that I did. It’s an opportunity for me to lay bare my feelings on how that \[family\] situation affected me, growing up. And where I\'m at now—at peace with it and moving on.” **“Little Q, Pt. 1 (Interlude)”** “Little Q is my cousin, Qudus, on my dad\'s side. We grew up together, but then there was a stage where we didn\'t really talk for some years. No bad blood, just doing different things, so when we reconnected, we had a real heart-to-heart—and I heard about all he’d been through. It made me feel like, ‘Damn, this is a blood relative, and he almost lost his life.’ I thank God he didn’t, but I thought of others like him. And I felt it was important that his story was heard and shared. So, I’m speaking from his perspective.” **“Little Q, Pt. 2”** “I grew up in North London and \[Little Q\] was raised in South, and as much as we both grew up in endz, his experience was obviously different to mine. Being a product of an environment or system that isn\'t really for you, it’s tough trying to navigate that.” **“Gems (Interlude)”** “This is another turning point, reminding myself to take time: ‘Breathe…you\'re human. Give what you can give, but don\'t burn out for anyone. Put yourself first.’ Just little gems that everyone needs to hear once in a while.” **“Speed”** “This track sends another reminder: ‘This game is a marathon, not a sprint. So pace yourself!’ I know where I\'m headed, and I\'m taking my time, with little breaks here and there. Now I know when to really hit the gas and also when to come off a bit.” **“Standing Ovation”** “I take some time to reflect here, like, ‘Wow, you\'re still here and still going. It’s been a slow burn, but you can afford to give yourself a pat on the back.’ But as well as being in the limelight, let\'s also acknowledge the people on the ground doing real amazing work: our key workers, our healers, teachers, cleaners. If you go to a toilet and it\'s dirty, people go in from 9 to 5 and make sure that shit is spotless for you, so let\'s also say thank you.” **“I See You”** “This is a really beautiful and poetic song on love. Sometimes as artists we tend to draw from traumatic times for great art, we’re hurt or in pain, but it was nice for me to be able to draw from a place of real joy in my life for this song. Even where it sits \[on the album\]: right in the center, the heart.” **“The Rapper That Came to Tea (Interlude)”** “This title is a play on \[Judith Kerr’s\] children\'s book *The Tiger Who Came to Tea*, and this is about me better understanding my introversion. I’m just posing questions to myself—I might not necessarily have answers for them, I think it\'s good to throw them out there and get the brain working a bit.” **“Rollin Stone”** “This cut reminds me somewhat of ’09 Simz, spitting with rapidness and being witty. And I’m also finding new ways to use my voice on the second half here, letting my evil twin have her time.” **“Protect My Energy”** “This is one of the songs I\'m really looking forward to performing live. It’s a stepper, and it got me really wanting to sing, to be honest. I very much enjoy being around good company, but these days I enjoy my personal space and I want to protect that.” **“Never Make Promises (Interlude)”** “This one is self-explanatory—nothing is promised at all. It’s a short intermission to lead to the next one, but at one point it was nearly the album intro.” **“Point and Kill” (feat. Obongjayar)** “This is a big vibe! It feels very much like Nigeria to me, and Obongjayar is one of my favorites at the moment. We recorded this in my living room on a whim—and I\'m very, very grateful that he graced this song. The title comes from a phrase used in Nigeria to pick out fish at the market, or a store. You point, they kill. But also metaphorically, whatever I want, I\'m going to get in the same way, essentially.” **“Fear No Man”** “This track continues the same vibe, even more so. It declares: ‘I\'m here. I\'m unapologetically me and I fear no one here. I\'m not shook of anyone in this rap game.’” **“The Garden (Interlude)”** “This track is just amazing musically. It’s about nurturing the seeds you plant. Nurture those relationships, and everything around you that\'s holding you down.” **“How Did You Get Here”** “I want everyone to know *how* I got here; from the jump, school days, to my rap group, Space Age. We were just figuring it out, being persistent. I cried whilst recording this song; it all hit me, like, ‘I\'m actually recording my fourth album.’ Sometimes I sit and I wonder if this is all really true.” **“Miss Understood”** “This is the perfect closer. I could have ended on the last track, easily, but, I don\'t know, it\'s kind of like doing 99 reps. You\'ve done 99, that\'s amazing, but you can do one more to just make it 100, you can. And for me it was like, ‘I\'m going to get this one in there.’”

As they worked on their third album, Wolf Alice would engage in an exercise. “We liked to play our demos over the top of muted movie trailers or particular scenes from films,” lead singer and guitarist Ellie Rowsell tells Apple Music. “It was to gather a sense of whether we’d captured the right vibe in the music. We threw around the word ‘cinematic’ a lot when trying to describe the sound we wanted to achieve, so it was a fun litmus test for us. And it’s kinda funny, too. Especially if you’re doing it over the top of *Skins*.” Halfway through *Blue Weekend*’s opening track, “The Beach,” Wolf Alice has checked off cinematic, and by its (suitably titled) closer, “The Beach II,” they’ve explored several film scores’ worth of emotion, moods, and sonic invention. It’s a triumphant guitar record, at once fan-pleasing and experimental, defiantly loud and beautifully quiet and the sound of a band hitting its stride. “We’ve distilled the purest form of Wolf Alice,” drummer Joel Amey says. *Blue Weekend* succeeds a Mercury Prize-winning second album (2017’s restless, bombastic *Visions of a Life*), and its genesis came at a decisive time for the North Londoners. “It was an amazing experience to get back in touch with actually writing and creating music as a band,” bassist Theo Ellis says. “We toured *Visions of a Life* for a very long time playing a similar selection of songs, and we did start to become robot versions of ourselves. When we first got back together at the first stage of writing *Blue Weekend*, we went to an Airbnb in Somerset and had a no-judgment creative session and showed each other all our weirdest ideas and it was really, really fun. That was the main thing I’d forgotten: how fun making music with the rest of the band is, and that it’s not just about playing a gig every evening.” The weird ideas evolved during sessions with producer Markus Dravs (Arcade Fire, Coldplay, Björk) in a locked-down Brussels across 2020. “He’s a producer that sees the full picture, and for him, it’s about what you do to make the song translate as well as possible,” guitarist Joff Oddie says. “Our approach is to throw loads of stuff at the recordings, put loads of layers on and play with loads of sound, but I think we met in the middle really nicely.” There’s a Bowie-esque majesty to tracks such as “Delicious Things” and “The Last Man on Earth”; “Smile” and “Play the Greatest Hits” were built for adoring festival crowds, while Rowsell’s songwriting has never revealed more vulnerability than on “Feeling Myself” and the especially gorgeous “No Hard Feelings” (“a song that had many different incarnations before it found its place on the record,” says Oddie. “That’s a testament to the song. I love Ellie’s vocal delivery. It’s really tender; it’s a beautiful piece of songwriting that is succinct, to the point, and moves me”). On an album so confident in its eclecticism, then, is there an overarching theme? “Each song represents its own story,” says Rowsell. “But with hindsight there are some running themes. It’s a lot about relationships with partners, friends, and with oneself, so there are themes of love and anxiety. Each song, though, can be enjoyed in isolation. Just as I find solace in writing and making music, I’d be absolutely chuffed if anyone had a similar experience listening to this. I like that this album has different songs for different moods. They can rage to ‘Play the Greatest Hits,’ or they can feel powerful to ‘Feeling Myself,’ or ‘they can have a good cathartic cry to ‘No Hard Feelings.’ That would be lovely.”

Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak were already hard at work on what would become *An Evening With Silk Sonic* when the pandemic shut down live music in early 2020, but they weren’t going to let that stop them from delivering a concert experience to their fans. “All of a sudden, my shows get canceled, Andy\'s shows get canceled,” Mars told Ebro Darden during their R&B Now interview. “This fear of ‘we’ll never be able to play live again’ comes into play. And to take that away from guys like us, that\'s all we know. So we\'re thinking, all right, let\'s put an album together that sounds like a show.” It began with the project’s lead single, “Leave the Door Open,” a syrupy-sweet piece of retro soul that Mars considers something of a backbone for the project. After its completion, he and .Paak began building out the nine songs of *An Evening With Silk Sonic*, soliciting help, in the few instances where they needed it, from friends like Bootsy Collins, Thundercat, and even Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds. Their access to HOF-worthy firepower notwithstanding, the pair always understood that their own combined musicality was the real draw. “We just wanted it to feel special,” Mars says. “Instead of trying to get too cute with the concept, it\'s like, what\'s more special than Anderson .Paak behind a drum set singing a song and me having his back when it\'s my turn, you know? And the band moving in the same direction? It was just like a musician\'s dream.” Below, the pair talk through some of the tracks that make *An Evening With Silk Sonic* an experience fans won’t soon forget. **“Leave the Door Open”** Bruno Mars: “Me and Andy come from the school of performing and playing live instruments. We wrote ‘Leave the Door Open’ and it was just one of those songs like, dang, I can’t believe we a part of this, and we don\'t know what it\'s gonna do, we don\'t care that it\'s a ballad or a whatever you wanna call it—to us, this just feels right and it\'s important. So no matter what, if it hit No. 1 or it didn\'t, me and Andy both know that that was the best we could do. And we were cool with that.” **“Fly as Me”** Anderson .Paak: “‘Fly as Me’ is a joint hook \[Mars\] had for a minute. He was trying to figure out some verses for it, trying to figure out the groove, and we spent some time on that.” Mars: “Andy goes behind the drum set one day and says, ‘The groove gotta be like this,’ and starts playing his groove. D’Mile is on the bass, I\'m on the guitar. After all the grooves we tried, I don\'t know what it is, there\'s something about someone in the studio, someone that you trust, saying, \'It\'s gotta be like this.’ And the groove you hear him playing, which is not an easy groove to play, was what he showed me and D. And we just followed suit.” **“After Last Night” (with Thundercat & Bootsy Collins)** Mars: “That one got a lot of Bootsy on it. And my boy Thundercat came in and blessed us. It’s just one of them songs—everything was built to be played live, so that song is one of those we can keep going for 10 minutes.” **“Smokin Out the Window”** Mars: “‘Smokin Out the Window’ was an idea we started four or five years ago on tour. It didn\'t sound nothing like how it does now, but we just had the idea. On \[.Paak’s\] birthday, I called him over. He was hysterical that night. After every take he was like, \'I\'m the king of R&B! I’m the best! Tell me I’m not the hottest in the game!\' We were going back and forth with the lines and who can make who laugh, and we end up finishing that song and he was like, \'I’m out, what we doing tomorrow?\'” **“Put On a Smile”** Mars: “I had a song that I played for Andy and I said, ‘What do you think about this?’ and he said, ‘It sucks.’ I start singing it again and he gets behind the drums and that\'s when the magic happens. So we come up with this hook and these chords and that\'s when we start cooking, when everything starts moving in the studio. The song\'s starting to sound real good now. I don’t wanna mess it up, so I call Babyface. I only call Face to know if I got something good, you know, ’cause he’ll tell me too, \'This is wack.\' For all of us to finish that record together, that was one of my favorite experiences on this album.” **“Skate”** Mars: “It\'s hard to be mad on some rollerskates. So really, that\'s kinda the essence of this album: If me and Andy were to host a party, what would that feel like? Summertime. Outside. Set up the congas and the drums and amplifiers, and what would that sound like? And this is what our best effort was: \'Skate.\'”

One could likely call the whole of Common’s catalog “movement music”—the term he’s using to encapsulate his output in the wake of 2020’s social justice uprising—but the MC is especially dialed in across his *A Beautiful Revolution* series. The second chapter, which arrived just short of a year after the first, is another helping of the Chicago-raised MC’s relentless positivity and undying expressions of devotion to Black women and Black culture. There are outright love letters like “Set It Free,” “Saving Grace,” and “Poetry” (an ode to the art form) and then semi-autobiographical messages of inspiration like “A Beautiful Chicago Kid” and “Star of the Gang.” Returning from *A Beautiful Revolution (Pt 1)* are guests Black Thought, Paris “PJ” Jones, Jessica Care Moore, and Morgan Parker, the latter two of whom bookmark the project with particularly stirring spoken-word pieces.

If Olivia Rodrigo has a superpower, it’s that, at 18, she already understands that adolescence spares no one. The heartbreak, the humiliation, the vertiginous weight of every lonesome thought and outsized feeling—none of that really leaves us, and exploring it honestly almost always makes for good pop songs. “I grew up listening to country music,” the California-born singer-songwriter (also an experienced actor and current star of Disney+’s *High School Musical: The Musical: The Series*) tells Apple Music. “And I think it’s so impactful and emotional because of how specific it is, how it really paints pictures of scenarios. I feel like a song is so much more special when you can visualize and picture it, even smell and taste all of the stuff that the songwriter\'s going through.” To listen to Rodrigo’s debut full-length is to know—on a very deep and almost uncomfortably familiar level—exactly what she was going through when she wrote it at 17. Anchored by the now-ubiquitous breakup ballad ‘drivers license’—an often harrowing, closely studied lead single that already felt like a lock for song-of-the-year honors the second it arrived in January 2021—*SOUR* combines the personal and universal to often devastating effect, folding diary-like candor and autobiographical detail into performances that recall the millennial pop of Taylor Swift (“favorite crime”) just as readily as the ’90s alt-rock of Elastica (“brutal”) and Alanis Morissette (“good 4 u”). It has the sound and feel of an instant classic, a *Jagged Little Pill* for Gen Z. “All the feelings that I was feeling were so intense,” Rodrigo says. “I called the record *SOUR* because it was this really sour period of my life—I remember being so sad, and so insecure, and so angry. I felt all those things, and they\'re still very real, but I\'m definitely not going through that as acutely as I used to. It’s nice to go back and see what I was feeling, and be like, ‘It all turned out all right. You\'re okay now.’” A little older and a lot wiser, Rodrigo shares the wisdom she learned channeling all of that into one of the most memorable debut albums in ages. **Let Your Mind Wander** “I took an AP psychology class in high school my junior year, and they said that you\'re the most creative when you\'re doing some type of menial task, because half of your brain is occupied with something and the other half is just left to roam. I find that I come up with really good ideas when I\'m driving for that same reason. I actually wrote the first verse and some of the chorus of **‘enough for you’** going on a walk around my neighborhood; I got the idea for **‘good 4 u’** in the shower. I think taking time to be out of the studio and to live your life is as productive—if not more—than just sitting in a room with your guitar trying to write songs. While making *SOUR*, there was maybe three weeks where I spent like six, seven days a week of 13 hours in the studio. I actually remember feeling so creatively dry, and the songs I was making weren\'t very good. I think that\'s a true testament to how productive rest can be. There\'s only so much you can write about when you\'re in the studio all day, just listening to your own stuff.” **Trust Your Instincts** “Before I met my collaborator, producer—and cowriter in many instances—Dan Nigro, I would just write songs in my bedroom, completely by myself. So it was a little bit of a learning curve, figuring out how to collaborate with other people and stick up for your ideas and be open to other people\'s. Sometimes it takes you a little while to gain the confidence to really remember that your gut feelings are super valid and what makes you a special musician. I struggled for a while with writing upbeat songs just because I thought in my head that I should write about happiness or love if I wanted to write a song that people could dance to. And **‘brutal’** is actually one of my favorite songs on *SOUR*, but it almost didn\'t make it on the record. Everyone was like, ‘You make it the first \[track\], people might turn it off as soon as they hear it.’ I think it\'s a great introduction to the world of *SOUR*.” **It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect** “I wrote this album when I was 17. There\'s sort of this feeling that goes along with putting out a record when you\'re that age, like, ‘Oh my god, this is not the best work that I\'ll ever be able to do. I could do better.’ So it was really important for me to learn that this album is a slice of my life and it doesn\'t have to be the best work that I\'ll ever do. Maybe my next record will be better, and maybe I\'ll grow. It\'s nice, I think, for listeners to go on that journey with songwriters and watch them refine their songwriting. It doesn\'t have to be perfect now—it’s the best that I can do when I\'m 17 years old, and that\'s enough and that\'s cool in its own right.” **Love What You Do** “I learned that I liked making songs a lot more than I like putting out songs, and that love of songwriting stayed the same for me throughout. I learned how to nurture it, instead of the, like, ‘Oh, I want to get a Top 40 hit!’-type thing. Honestly, when ‘drivers license’ came out, I was sort of worried that it was going to be the opposite and I was going to write all of my songs from the perspective of wanting it to chart. But I really just love writing songs, and I think that\'s a really cool position to be in.” **Find Your People** “I feel like the purpose of ‘yes’ people in your life is to make you feel secure. But whenever I\'m around people who think that everything I do is incredible, I feel so insecure for some reason; I think that everything is bad and they\'re just lying to me the whole time. So it\'s really awesome to have somebody who I really trust with me in the studio. That\'s Dan. He’ll tell me, ‘This is an amazing song. Let\'s do it.’ But I\'ll also play him a song that I really like and he’ll say, ‘You know what, I don\'t think this is your best song. I think you can write a better one.’ There\'s something so empowering and something so cool about that, about surrounding yourself with people who care enough about you to tell you when you can do better. Being a songwriter is sort of strange in that I feel like I\'ve written songs and said things, told people secrets through my songs that I don\'t even tell some people that I hang out with all the time. It\'s a sort of really super mega vulnerable thing to do. But then again, it\'s the people around me who really love me and care for me who gave me the confidence to sort of do that and show who I really am.” **You Really Never Know** “To me, ‘drivers license’ was never one of those songs that I would think: ‘It\'s a hit song.’ It\'s just a little slice of my heart, this really sad song. It was really cool for me to see evidence of how authenticity and vulnerability really connect with people. And everyone always says that, but you really never know. So many grown men will come up to me and be like, ‘Yo, I\'m happily married with three kids, but that song brought me back to my high school breakup.’ Which is so cool, to be able to affect not only people who are going through the same thing as you, but to bring them back to a time where they were going through the same thing as you are. That\'s just surreal, a songwriter\'s dream.”

“I don’t like to agonize over things,” Arlo Parks tells Apple Music. “It can tarnish the magic a little. Usually a song will take an hour or less from conception to end. If I listen back and it’s how I pictured it, I move on.” The West London poet-turned-songwriter is right to trust her “gut feeling.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* is a debut album that crystallizes her talent for chronicling sadness and optimism in universally felt indie-pop confessionals. “I wanted a sense of balance,” she says. “The record had to face the difficult parts of life in a way that was unflinching but without feeling all-consuming and miserable. It also needed to carry that undertone of hope, without feeling naive. It had to reflect the bittersweet quality of being alive.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* achieves all this, scrapbooking adolescent milestones and Parks’ own sonic evolution to form something quite spectacular. Here, she talks us through her work, track by track. **Collapsed in Sunbeams** “I knew that I wanted poetry in the album, but I wasn\'t quite sure where it was going to sit. This spoken-word piece is actually the last thing that I did for the album, and I recorded it in my bedroom. I liked the idea of speaking to the listener in a way that felt intimate—I wanted to acknowledge the fact that even though the stories in the album are about me, my life and my world, I\'m also embarking on this journey with listeners. I wanted to create an avalanche of imagery. I’ve always gravitated towards very sensory writers—people like Zadie Smith or Eileen Myles who hone in on those little details. I also wanted to explore the idea of healing, growth, and making peace with yourself in a holistic way. Because this album is about those first times where I fell in love, where I felt pain, where I stood up for myself, and where I set boundaries.” **Hurt** “I was coming off the back of writer\'s block and feeling quite paralyzed by the idea of making an album. It felt quite daunting to me. Luca \[Buccellati, Parks’ co-producer and co-writer\] had just come over from LA, and it was January, and we hadn\'t seen each other in a while. I\'d been listening to plenty of Motown and The Supremes, plus a lot of Inflo\'s production and Cleo Sol\'s work. I wanted to create something that felt triumphant, and that you could dance to. The idea was for the song to expose how tough things can be but revolve around the idea of the possibility for joy in the future. There’s a quote by \[Caribbean American poet\] Audre Lorde that I really liked: ‘Pain will either change or end.’ That\'s what the song revolved around for me.” **Too Good** “I did this one with Paul Epworth in one of our first days of sessions. I showed him all the music that I was obsessed with at the time, from ’70s Zambian psychedelic rock to MF DOOM and the hip-hop that I love via Tame Impala and big ’90s throwback pop by TLC. From there, it was a whirlwind. Paul started playing this drumbeat, and then I was just running around for ages singing into mics and going off to do stuff on the guitar. I love some of the little details, like the bump on someone’s wrist and getting to name-drop Thom Yorke. It feels truly me.” **Hope** “This song is about a friend of mine—but also explores that universal idea of being stuck inside, feeling depressed, isolated, and alone, and being ashamed of feeling that way, too. It’s strange how serendipitous a lot of themes have proved as we go through the pandemic. That sense of shame is present in the verses, so I wanted the chorus to be this rallying cry. I imagined a room full of people at a show who maybe had felt alone at some point in their lives singing together as this collective cry so they could look around and realize they’re not alone. I wanted to also have the little spoken-word breakdown, just as a moment to bring me closer to the listener. As if I’m on the other side of a phone call.” **Caroline** “I wrote ‘Caroline’ and ‘For Violet’ on the same, very inspired day. I had my little £8 bottle of Casillero del Diablo. I was taken back to when I first started writing at seven or eight, where I would write these very observant and very character-based short stories. I recalled this argument that I’d seen taken place between a couple on Oxford Street. I only saw about 30 seconds of it, but I found myself wondering all these things. Why was their relationship exploding out in the open like that? What caused it? Did the relationship end right there and then? The idea of witnessing a relationship without context was really interesting to me, and so the lyrics just came out as a stream of consciousness, like I was relaying the story to a friend. The harmonies are also important on this song, and were inspired by this video I found of The Beatles performing ‘This Boy.’ The chorus feels like such an explosion—such a release—and harmonies can accentuate that.” **Black Dog** “A very special song to me. I wrote this about my best friend. I remember writing that song and feeling so confused and helpless trying to understand depression and what she was going through, and using music as a form of personal catharsis to work through things that felt impossible to work through. I recorded the vocals with this lump in my throat because it was so raw. Musically, I was harking back to songs like ‘Nude’ and ‘House of Cards’ on *In Rainbows*, plus music by Nick Drake and tracks from Sufjan Stevens’ *Carrie & Lowell*. I wanted something that felt stripped down.” **Green Eyes** “I was really inspired by Frank Ocean here—particularly ‘Futura Free’ \[from 2016’s *Blonde*\]. I was also listening to *Moon Safari* by Air, Stereolab, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Tirzah, Beach House, and a lot of that dreamy, nostalgic pop music that I love. It was important that the instrumental carry a warmth because the song explores quite painful places in the verses. I wanted to approach this topic of self-acceptance and self-discovery, plus people\'s parents not accepting them and the idea of sexuality. Understanding that you only need to focus on being yourself has been hard-won knowledge for me.” **Just Go** “A lot of the experiences I’ve had with toxic people distilled into one song. I wanted to talk about the idea of getting negative energy out of your life and how refreshed but also sad it leaves you feeling afterwards. That little twinge from missing someone, but knowing that you’re so much better off without them. I was thinking about those moments where you’re trying to solve conflict in a peaceful way, but there are all these explosions of drama. You end up realizing, ‘You haven’t changed, man.’ So I wanted a breakup song that said, simply, ‘No grudges, but please leave my life.’” **For Violet** “I imagined being in space, or being in a desert with everything silent and you’re alone with your thoughts. I was thinking about ‘Roads’ by Portishead, which gives me that similar feeling. It\'s minimal, it\'s dark, it\'s deep, it\'s gritty. The song covers those moments growing up when you realize that the world is a little bit heavier and darker than you first knew. I think everybody has that moment where their innocence is broken down a little bit. It’s a story about those big moments that you have to weather in friendships, and asking how you help somebody without over-challenging yourself. That\'s a balance that I talk about in the record a lot.” **Eugene** “Both ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Eugene’ represent a middle chapter between my earlier EPs and the record. I was pulling from all these different sonic places and trying to create a sound that felt warmer, and I was experimenting with lyrics that felt a little more surreal. I was talking a lot about dreams for the first time, and things that were incredibly personal. It felt like a real step forward in terms of my confidence as a writer, and to receive messages from people saying that the song has helped get them to a place where they’re more comfortable with themselves is incredible.” **Bluish** “I wanted it to feel very close. Very compact and with space in weird places. It needed to mimic the idea of feeling claustrophobic in a friendship. That feeling of being constantly asked to give more than you can and expected to be there in ways that you can’t. I wanted to explore the idea of setting boundaries. The Afrobeat-y beat was actually inspired by Radiohead’s ‘Identikit’ \[from 2016’s *A Moon Shaped Pool*\]. The lyrics are almost overflowing with imagery, which was something I loved about Adrianne Lenker’s *songs* album: She has these moments where she’s talking about all these different moments, and colors and senses, textures and emotions. This song needed to feel like an assault on the senses.” **Portra 400** “I wanted this song to feel like the end credits rolling down on one of those coming-of-age films, like *Dazed and Confused* or *The Breakfast Club*. Euphoric, but capturing the bittersweet sentiment of the record. Making rainbows out of something painful. Paul \[Epworth\] added so much warmth and muscularity that it feels like you’re ending on a high. The song’s partly inspired by *Just Kids* by Patti Smith, and that idea of relationships being dissolved and wrecked by people’s unhealthy coping mechanisms.”

When Leon Bridges set out to make his third album, he wanted it to be different this time around. “We felt like the only way to unlock a unique sound was to create this immersive experience and find a place that was aesthetically inspiring,” he tells Apple Music. He landed on Gold-Diggers in East Hollywood, a three-in-one bar, hotel, and recording studio that allowed the Texas-bred singer to tap into his sound the way he hears it in his head, free from the expectations of others. “It definitely felt the most liberating to me,” he says of the process. “I was just able to be myself and let go of any inhibitions and create without any boundaries.” The songs born of those sessions—produced by Ricky Reed and Nate Mercereau—became *Gold-Diggers Sound* and some of Bridges’ most refined work. He rose to fame through his ’50s and ’60s soul stylings, but the R&B contained within this album situates its nostalgia in a more modern context, bridging ’80s and ’90s R&B with lush, jazz-inspired live instrumentation. His writing coupled with his voice has long been the centerpiece, but hearing both in this context is to experience them anew. “When you look at *Gold-Diggers Sound*, a lot of these songs were derived from improvisational jams,” Bridges says. “Back to the basics of musicians in a room and creating music from the ground up.” Here he walks through each song on the album. **“Born Again”** “‘Born Again’ is a song that transpired out of the pandemic. Pretty much everything on *Gold-Diggers Sound* was born within the Gold-Diggers space, but this is one that happened after the fact. Basically, Ricky Reed was doing this livestream series where he would produce a song live. He sent me an instrumental, and he wanted me to write something to it and send it in the next day, so I was stressing out like crazy because I just couldn\'t think of what to write about. I woke up that morning and the song came to me. I wanted to make it parallel to the concept of spiritual newness within a gospel context or within the Bible, but I take that concept and just talk about how I felt during the pandemic and how the pandemic was very healing for me. I felt like this song was a great opener for the album, and it totally sets the mood.” **“Motorbike”** “The instrumental of ‘Motorbike’ was already something that my friend Nate Mercereau was working on, and it resonated with me, and everyone else during the session just kind of slept on it. I went out to Puerto Rico for my 30th birthday, and I was able to spend that time with some of my best friends, and there was just so much camaraderie and love in that moment. I wanted to take that feeling of just living in the moment and escaping with someone you love, and so that\'s kind of what \'Motorbike\' is.” **“Steam”** “This is almost reminiscent of a Talking Heads kind of thing. \'Steam\' is one of the first songs that we worked on for this album. It\'s like a vibe of being at the party and the party gets cut short, and you want to prolong the hang, and so the best thing to do is just bring it on back to the hotel for the after-party.” **“Why Don’t You Touch Me”** “Shout-out to the undefeated, badass songwriter Kaydence. This was a tune that we worked on remotely during the pandemic and just felt like it was a cool angle to write about love diminishing in a relationship from a man\'s perspective. And just the crippling feeling of being physically close to someone but emotionally distant. It\'s an angle that you don\'t really hear often from a man\'s perspective, and so that\'s kind of the inspiration behind that.” **“Magnolias”** “I immediately was pigeonholed after my first album, and the more I continue to create, I want to be honest about the music that inspires me. I love the juxtaposition of that beautiful acoustic guitar with the more trap, modern R&B thing. My mother always used to encourage me to write a song about this magnolia tree that was in her backyard. And so I kind of took that and shaped the lyrics around it. In my head, as far as the chorus, it felt like this is how Sade would sing it in terms of that melody. That probably doesn\'t make sense, but it made sense in my head at the time.” **“Gold-Diggers (Junior’s Fanfare)”** “Shout-out to Ricky Reed for curating some really awesome horn players. I mean, you got Josh Johnson and Keyon Harrold, and with the inception of this album, I wanted to do a progressive sound but also keep it rooted with some organic elements. And so I felt it was important to have jazz interwoven throughout all of this album. It\'s a really awesome interlude, and it\'s something that you don\'t really hear a lot within the R&B space.” **“Details”** “‘Details’ is about learning to appreciate the small things. It\'s the little details that paint the big picture.” **“Sho Nuff”** “For ‘Sho Nuff,’ I wanted to take a page out of Houston culture. I love when you look at artists like UGK—I love the fact that those guys incorporated soul music within their songs. And so that guitar part is definitely reminiscent of that. I wanted to have this very minimalistic, soulful guitar and juxtapose that with a sexy vibe.” **“Sweeter”** “Throughout my career, I\'ve always been scrutinized for not making political music, and I\'ve kind of sat with that for a long time. I just didn\'t want to half-ass it. So this is a moment where Terrace Martin jumped off a session with these crazy chords. And for me, the chords or whatever\'s happening in the music always dictates what the song is about. As soon as he started playing that, I knew immediately this was the moment for \'Sweeter.\' We wrote this prior to the situation of George Floyd, but it\'s reflective of the perpetual narrative of Black men dying at the hands of police. We had been sitting on this song for a while, and I was planning to release a tune with my friend Lucky Daye and we kind of put that on the back burner. But after George Floyd, I was totally compelled to just put this out in the world in hopes it would serve as the beacon of light and hope.” **“Don’t Worry”** “‘Don\'t Worry’ is kind of a stream of thoughts to myself, reminiscing about a past lover and who she\'s currently with. Shout-out to my friend Ink, who is the singer-songwriter from Atlanta, and she embodies this country-hood type of vibe. Her energy is so infectious. I mean, she literally walks into the studio every day with cowboy boots and a cowboy hat and then just like brings this really awesome energy to the music—that\'s kind of how \'Don\'t Worry\' came about.” **“Blue Mesas”** “This whole album encapsulates the multifaceted aspects of life. It\'s not serious all the time, but sometimes there are those moments that capture the struggle, and that\'s what it was for me. \'Blue Mesas\' just talks about the moment when I transitioned into fame, and it was honestly hard for me. When you take an insecure person and put them in the limelight, some people can tend to fold or thrive. I\'m grateful that I had great people around me to help me get through those struggles. \'Blue Mesas\' is just like that feeling of the solitude and weight that comes with having a little notoriety and still feeling isolated—even in the midst of people that love you.”

“Right then, I’m ready,” Adele says quietly at the close of *30*’s opening track, “Strangers By Nature.” It feels like a moment of gentle—but firm—self-encouragement. This album is something that clearly required a few deep breaths for Tottenham’s most celebrated export. “There were moments when I was writing these songs, and even when I was mixing them and stuff like that, where I was like, ‘Maybe I don\'t need to put this album out,’” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Like, ‘Maybe I should write another.’ Just because music is my therapy. I\'m never going into the studio to be like, ‘Right, I need another hit.’ It\'s not like that for me. When something is more powerful and overwhelming \[to\] me, I like to go to a studio, because it\'s normally a basement and there\'s no fucking windows and no reception, so no one can get ahold of me. So I\'m basically running away. And no one would\'ve known I\'d written that record. Maybe I just had to get it out of my system.” But, almost two years after much of it was completed, Adele did release *30*. And remarkably, considering the world has been using her back catalog to channel its rawest emotions since 2008, this is easily Adele’s most vulnerable record. It concerns itself with Big Things Only—crippling guilt over her 2019 divorce, motherhood, daring to date as one of the world’s most famous people, falling in love—capturing perfectly the wobbly resolve of a broken heart in repair. Its songs often feel sentimental in a way that’s unusually warm and inviting, very California, and crucially: *earned*. “The album is for my son, for Angelo,” she says. “I knew I had to tell his story in a song because it was very clear he was feeling it, even though I thought I was doing a very good job of being like, ‘Everything’s fine.’ But I also knew I wasn’t being as present. I was just so consumed by so many different feelings. And he plucked up the courage to very articulately say to me, ‘You’re basically a ghost. You might as well not be here.’ What kind of poet is that? For him to be little and say ‘I can’t see you’ to my face broke my heart.” This is also Adele’s most confident album sonically. She fancied paying tribute to Judy Garland with Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson (“Strangers By Nature”), so she did. “I’d watched the Judy Garland biopic,” she says. “And I remember thinking, ‘Why did everyone stop writing such incredible melodies and cadences and harmonies?’” She felt comfortable working heartbreaking bedside chats with her young son and a voice memo documenting her own fragile mental state into her music on “My Little Love.” “While I was writing it, I just remember thinking of any child that’s been through divorce or any person that has been though a divorce themselves, or anyone that wants to leave a relationship and never will,” she says. “I thought about all of them, because my divorce really humanized my parents for me.” The album does not steep in sorrow and regret, however: There’s a Max Martin blockbuster with a whistled chorus (“Can I Get It”), a twinkling interlude sampling iconic jazz pianist Erroll Garner (“All Night Parking”), and the fruits of a new creative partnership with Dean Josiah Cover—aka Michael Kiwanuka, Sault, and Little Simz producer Inflo. “The minute I realized he \[Inflo\] was from North London, I wouldn’t stop talking to him,” she says. “We got no work done. It was only a couple of months after I’d left my marriage, and we got on so well, but he could feel that something was wrong. He knew that something dark was happening in me. I just opened up. I was dying for someone to ask me how I was.” One of the Inflo tracks, “Hold On,” is the album’s centerpiece. Rolling through self-loathing (“I swear to god, I am such a mess/The harder that I try, I regress”) into instantly quotable revelations (“Sometimes loneliness is the only rest we get”) before reaching show-stopping defiance (“Let time be patient, let pain be gracious/Love will soon come, if you just hold on”), the song accesses something like final-form Adele. It’s a rainbow of emotions, it’s got a choir (“I got my friends to come and sing,” she tells Apple Music), and she hits notes we’ll all only dare tackle in cars, solo. “I definitely lost hope a number of times that I’d ever find my joy again,” she says. “I remember I didn’t barely laugh for about a year. But I didn’t realize I was making progress until I wrote ‘Hold On’ and listened to it back. Later, I was like, ‘Oh, fuck, I’ve really learned a lot. I’ve really come a long way.’” So, after all this, is Adele happy that *30* found its way to the world? “It really helped me, this album,” she says. “I really think that some of the songs on this album could really help people, really change people’s lives. A song like ‘Hold On’ could actually save a few lives.” It’s also an album she feels could support fellow artists. “I think it’s an important record for them to hear,” she says. “The ones that I feel are being encouraged not to value their own art, and that everything should be massive and everything should be ‘get it while you can’… I just wanted to remind them that you don’t need to be in everyone’s faces all the time. And also, you can really write from your stomach, if you want.”

“It happened by accident,” Halsey tells Apple Music of their fourth full-length. “I wasn\'t trying to make a political record, or a record that was drowning in its own profundity—I was just writing about how I feel. And I happen to be experiencing something that is very nuanced and very complicated.” Written while they were pregnant with their first child, *If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power* finds the pop superstar sifting through dark thoughts and deep fears, offering a picture of maternity that fully acknowledges its emotional and physical realities—what it might mean for one’s body, one’s sense of purpose and self. “The reason that the album has sort of this horror theme is because this experience, in a way, has its horrors,” Halsey says. “I think everyone who has heard me yearn for motherhood for so long would have expected me to write an album that was full of gratitude. Instead, I was like, ‘No, this shit is so scary and so horrifying. My body\'s changing and I have no control over anything.’ Pregnancy for some women is a dream—and for some people it’s a fucking nightmare. That\'s the thing that nobody else talks about.” To capture a sound that reflected the album’s natural sense of conflict, Halsey reached out to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. “I wanted cinematic, really unsettling production,” they say. “They wanted to know if I was willing to take the risk—I was.” A clear departure from the psychedelic softness of 2020’s *Manic*, the album showcases their influence from the start: in the negative space and 10-ton piano notes of “The Tradition,” the smoggy atmospherics of “Bells in Santa Fe,” the howling guitars of “Easier Than Lying,” the feverish synths of “I am not a woman, I’m a god.” Lyrically, Halsey says, it’s like an emptying of her emotional vault—“expressions of guilt or insecurity, stories of sexual promiscuity or self-destruction”—and a coming to terms with who they have been before becoming responsible for someone else; its fury is a response to an ancient dilemma, as they’ve experienced it. “I think being pregnant in the public eye is a really difficult thing, because as a performer, so much of your identity is predicated on being sexually desirable,” they say. “Socially, women have been reduced to two categories: You are the Madonna or the whore. So if you are sexually desirable or a sexual being, you\'re unfit for motherhood. But as soon as you are motherly or maternal and somebody does want you as the mother of their child, you\'re unfuckable. Those are your options; those things are not compatible, and they haven’t been for centuries.” But there are feelings of resolution as well. Recorded in conjunction with the shooting of a companion film, *If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power* is an album that’s meant to document Halsey’s transformation. And at its conclusion is “Ya’aburnee”—Arabic for “you bury me”—a sparse love song to both their baby and partner. Just the sound of their voice and a muted guitar, it’s one of the most powerful songs Halsey has written to date. “I start this journey with ‘Okay, fine—if I can\'t have love, then I want power,’” they say. “If I can\'t have a relationship, I\'m going to work. If I can\'t be loved interpersonally, I\'m going to be loved by millions on the internet, or I\'m going to crave attention elsewhere. I\'m so steadfast with this mentality, and then comes this baby. The irony is that the most power I\'ve ever had is in my agency, being able to choose. You realize, by the end of the record, I chose love.”

“*Back of My Mind* is accepting the vulnerability—being able to quiet the noise around me and listen to my own voice,” H.E.R. shares in the short film that accompanies her debut album. “It\'s the many layers that make me, me. It\'s all of the things that we\'re kind of afraid to share, afraid to say, afraid to do.” Within the opening minutes, on “We Made It,” that sentiment is clear, as the multi-hyphenate singer-songwriter drinks in the moment and the success that\'s taken her from nights she was uncertain to the Grammy stage and beyond. The percussion is crisp, and her guitar wails through a solo, and right away, we\'re engrossed in the lush, technical precision that has made H.E.R. one of the most gifted musicians of her generation. Over the course of the album\'s 21 songs, she offers the many modes which make up H.E.R. Sultry slow jams run up against funky grooves while stripped-back ballads exist alongside trap beats—together, they span the modern history of R&B and position H.E.R. as both a student of the genre and a bellwether in her own right. “There were a lot of records on this album that I realized were like elevated versions of songs on my first projects, *Vol. 1* and *Vol. 2*, where sonically, it\'s vibey. It\'s like that alternative, kind of new R&B sound,” she says in the film. “But with live instrumentation, it just took it to another level. It\'s a celebration of all things that make R&B—the different aspects, the different sounds of R&B. R&B is the foundation of all music.” Over the years, H.E.R.\'s work within the genre has only grown more expansive. Where once she was an artist defined by her anonymity, she\'s now unafraid of her own light, a full-fledged star whose versatility is matched only by her musicality. *Back of My Mind* effectively captures her at, arguably, the most brilliant, confident, and freewheeling she\'s ever been. In an often overprogrammed world, it\'s the instrumentation that takes the project to another level—the space where she\'s finally able to fully express herself. “This album is representing this freedom of creativity that people are now accepting of me,” she says. “Music is my playground, and I can do whatever I want.”

Shirley Manson struggles to explain how a Garbage record comes together. It just happens. “We don’t really speak to each other about anything, we just go into a room and what comes out is what comes out,” the singer tells Apple Music. “It’s usually a shambolic kind of journey. Somehow we end up with a record at the end of it all and we wonder how we did it. It’s a mystery, which I think is probably as it should be.” The quartet refines their chaotic process into another captivating collection of electronic-rock anthems on seventh album *No Gods No Masters*, a record that takes in snarling techno-punk, synth-pop flourishes, and atmospheric balladry across its 11 tracks (this version also includes a bonus disc of covers). Combining themes of personal turmoil with state-of-the-nation temperature-taking, it swerves from defiance to despair and back again, with Manson in exhilarating lyrical form throughout. “I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to articulate somewhat complex issues in quite a colorful way without being too heavy-handed,” she says. It all began with Manson and her bandmates—Duke Erikson, Steve Marker, and Butch Vig—in a room together in Palm Springs, California, thrashing out ideas. However, lockdown meant it had to be completed remotely. Manson says they drew on three decades’ worth of experience to get the job done. “I have to commend the whole band on being able to shape-shift and adapt,” she says. “I think one of the reasons we’ve had a long career is everybody in this band is capable of adapting.” Here, Manson unravels some of the mystery of how they do it by taking us through the album, track by track. **“The Men Who Rule the World”** “It was Butch’s call to open with this. I was like, ‘I don\'t know. I feel like maybe not.’ And then I tried a billion different ways of sequencing the record and each time I had to come back to ‘The Men Who Rule the World’—that was really pretty much the only place for it. It’s definitely a mood setter. I think it’s really good-natured, but it’s this sort of retelling of Noah’s Ark, it’s a biblical tale. It’s grand in theme, but it has a lot of humor in it, and also a lot of outrage. To me, that’s the perfect combo.” **“The Creeps”** “These lyrics tell a tale of great change in my mind. I had told myself that at the grand old age of 40, I was over the hill and I would never, ever be an artist again. I got paralyzed and depressed. I was driving along Los Feliz Boulevard, having been dropped by Interscope Records, and I saw a garage sale selling a shop-size poster of my band. I was so humiliated. But from that humiliation, I somehow managed to free myself from public perception and industry perception and expectations and focus on trying to have a good life and being creative and singing and making music and writing. My life bloomed from that point forward, so ‘The Creeps’ is important to me.” **“Uncomfortably Me”** “I think everyone can relate to that feeling of not being fully developed yet and feeling uncertain and fearful and not fitting in. Certainly, an overriding feeling my whole life is that I just never quite fit in at a dinner party, I never quite fit in a festival bill. I feel like I don’t even fit into my own band—I’m the only woman, I’m much younger, I come from Scotland and they’re American. I just feel like a permanent outsider. And the band do too, we just don’t fit in with any scene. It used to upset and frustrate me, but now I’m like, ‘It’s fucking great.’ In this world that has a plethora of bands and artists, we are here in a singular form.” **“Wolves”** “I stumbled upon this Eastern European fairy tale about the idea of two wolves that exist in each human being and wrestle with one another. You choose how you’re going to respond to a situation. Even though you think it’s just instinct, it’s actually a split-second choice. ‘Am I going to be an asshole or am I actually going to try and deal with this situation with kindness?’ It’s hard for me not to be an asshole. I want to attack; that’s just my natural state of being. If someone hurts or offends me, or makes me scared, my instinct is to destroy. As I’m getting older, I want to choose kindness instead and I want to try and control the hardcore wolf and let the kind, soft wolf out instead.” **“Waiting for God”** “I would have felt really disappointed in myself if I hadn’t touched on systemic racism on this record. It really is something that’s just become more and more pressing on me. When Trayvon Martin was murdered—this beautiful 17-year-old kid, walking home at night in a hoodie, holding a bag of Skittles in his hands and he gets shot by a white supremacist—and the way his death was treated in the press, the way that disgusting George Zimmerman got off by pleading his own fear, I think it triggered something in me. I finally started really paying attention. And I have great shame around the fact that it’s taken me this long and I’m 54 years old. But after the death of Trayvon Martin, I just saw this alarming spate of murders of Black kids in America, it was shocking. It felt like it was every day and nobody gave a shit.” **“Godhead”** “‘Godhead’ is really tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also stating the obvious, which is: If I was a male, I would be treated very differently in the world. I know this because of some of the misogyny and sexism I have endured as a professional musician. When I was in my thirties, it infuriated me to the point that I couldn’t really see straight. Now, I find it almost funny that the male is given all this gravitas in society because he’s got a silly cock and balls between his legs and women aren’t given the same amount of gravitas because we’ve got vaginas. When you start examining that patriarchal coloring of absolutely everything, that even God is sold to you as a male figure, you start to see this insidious madness that conditions males into feeling they’re more important. And it conditions females into thinking they are less important. And it’s really beginning to wear on me terribly.” **“Anonymous XXX”** “We kept on obsessing over Roxy Music and how modern they still sound, and how exciting and dangerous. The idea of danger in music seems to have been almost eradicated entirely, certainly in mainstream pop music. We were obsessing over Andy Mackay’s sax sound, and so we wrote a song using a synth sax. I wanted to write about this idea of anonymous sex. I find it so fascinating. What attracts us to having sex with people we don’t know? And why do we project all our longing onto these kinds of dalliances? It was that fascination with the hidden and the secrets and the self-deception.” **“A Woman Destroyed”** “I think this is my attempt to flip the narrative on what was happening with the Me Too movement, where I felt women were being portrayed poorly by the media. And it pissed me off that so much of the discussion was focusing on the victimization of women and what had women done to encourage their attacks on their bodies and on their freedoms. I wanted to create a female superhero who took revenge much like *A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night*, which is the Persian movie by Ana Lily Amirpour. I love that notion of this vampire taking revenge on those who hurt her. And so the song is a cinematic fantasy of revenge.” **“Flipping the Bird”** “I was inspired by *Men Explain Things to Me* by Rebecca Solnit, and this idea of suddenly being aware that a lot of the time, when you’re choosing to engage with men about certain subjects, they automatically assume that you know nothing and that they are the ones who know everything. I was also inspired by hanging out with Liz Phair and feeling a little taken over by her spirit. I wanted to sing a song like she does, where she always picks a really low register in her voice. It’s an acerbic look at the male ego and how women often choose, myself included, to form ourselves around this ego in the room in order to keep the peace and not have an angry man. We make these little compromises on the surface, but behind our eyes, there’s a whole other perception of what’s going down.” **“No Gods No Masters”** “I sing on this song, ‘No masters or gods to obey,’ and I was like, ‘Great, “no gods no masters” is the old punk slogan’ and that seemed like the perfect title for the whole record because of what was going on socially at the time. There was just so much dissent and rebellions against governments and the people really rising up, whether it was the Me Too movement, the Black Lives Matter movement—it was a glorious, beautiful thing to see. We all want good things for our babies, our families, our friends. And yet we so often then want to crush someone else’s spirit, who’s not our friend, who’s not our baby, who’s not our family. And it’s a mystery to me. And yet the world tumbles on, evolution continues. The future still holds. And that is a glorious thing. I love feeling hopeful about new generations who will eventually sort this shit out.” **“This City Will Kill You”** “This song is a goodbye and it’s an elegy, but it’s also hopeful. If you find yourself in shit, it doesn’t mean you have to stay there. It doesn’t mean your life is over. I still believe in the possibilities \[that\] you can turn pretty much anything around. I wanted that sense of comfort to be there, because it’s a dark record, it’s a difficult record. I wanted this to be, at the end of everything, like an embrace, like, ‘It’s going to be OK.’”

If the first *King’s Disease* project was Nas reveling in the legacy he’d sown over three-plus decades in the game, its sequel—arriving just short of a year later—is the legendary MC settling that much further into what he thinks great rap should sound like in 2021. In this case, that’s another full-length project co-executive-produced by celebrated Fontana, California-hailing beatsmith Hit-Boy, this time featuring a handful of eyebrow-raising moments like the pairing of hip-hop legends EPMD and Eminem (“EPMD 2”), a revisitation of the static—and eventual reconciliation—he shared with 2Pac (“Death Row East”), and a brand-new rap verse from the illustrious Ms. Lauryn Hill (“Nobody”). Not unlike its predecessor, *King’s Disease II* features a small handful of guests, something Nas saw fit to acknowledge in rhyme on “Moments”: “My whole career I steered away from features/But I figured it’s perfect timing to embrace the leaders.” While that first statement is a bit of revisionist history, we won’t pretend that sharing airspace with the don hasn’t always been—and isn’t still—something of an honor, one he’s chosen to bestow here upon A Boogie wit da Hoodie, YG, and Hit-Boy. He contextualizes this particularly well toward that same song’s end, reminding us of his impact when he cites “moments you can’t relive/Like your first time bugging from something that Nas said.”

“I always want to engage the listener in a question instead of an answer,” Brandi Carlile tells Apple Music in a conversation about her new album and its provocative title. “That\'s why it\'s *In These Silent Days*. It\'s a question: What did you learn? What did you make of yourself? What did you lose? What happened to you in this time? I want to invite people to reflect, because it\'s such a pivotal time in human history, and a real spiritual upheaval for so many people in really positive and really negative, complicated ways.” Carlile herself was in a deeply retrospective—and stationary—place when she started working on her seventh album. After the resounding success of 2018’s *By the Way, I Forgive You* (which earned her three Grammys), the folk-rock singer-songwriter and her collaborators Phil and Tim Hanseroth (affectionately known as “the twins”) spent much of the two years following its release on the road, pausing only to record the 2019 debut record from The Highwomen, Carlile’s country supergroup with Maren Morris, Amanda Shires, and Natalie Hemby, and for Carlile to co-produce *While I’m Livin’*, the comeback album for outlaw country queen Tanya Tucker. The pandemic forced a slowdown in 2020, and that’s when Carlile started writing—the songs that would eventually wind up on *In These Silent Days*, but also her memoir, *Broken Horses*. “Writing that book gave me this really linear understanding of ‘here\'s how I started and here\'s how I am, and these are the things in between that made it so,’ and it was such clarity,” she says. “This was the first time that I knew what I was writing the songs about while I was writing them. I had so much more to pull from, so much more sensory material, than this abstract half-truth.” *In These Silent Days* meets the standard Carlile has set for her own songwriting: Piano-laden power ballads abound, from the sweeping grandeur of album opener “Right on Time” to the Elton John-channeling “Letter to the Past” through to “Sinners, Saints and Fools,” which gives any rock opera climax a run for its money. Fingerpickin’ folk anthems (“Mama Werewolf”), acoustic meditations (“When You’re Wrong”), and straightforward rock (“Broken Horses”) round out the album and recall the intimacy and intensity that have come to define her live shows. It’s both a companion piece to her memoir and a separate musical autobiography: This is how Carlile spent her silent days, and she wouldn’t have had it any other way. “I realized how much affirmation I get from strangers—that life-affirming response that you get from an audience when you perform,” she says of her new perspective gleaned from this transformative time. “If everybody could just have a job where they just go to scream and stomp all the time, I think they would probably find themselves a little more well-rounded.”

When she debuted in 1993 with the seminal *Exile in Guyville*, Liz Phair planted her flag as indie rock’s resident acid-tongued queen. The Chicago singer-songwriter, who recorded the project as an alleged track-by-track response to The Rolling Stones’ *Exile on Main St.*, challenged the machismo of the scene with a deadpan frankness that was just as evocative as it was shocking. In the years since, Phair has lived nine lives in the music biz: She released two follow-ups (’94’s *Whip-Smart* and ’98’s *Whitechocolatespacegg*) before unleashing 2003’s self-titled LP—a step into the mainstream that many critics interpreted as an anodyne attempt at radio success and, more importantly, a betrayal of her brusque beginnings. In classic Phair fashion, of course, she had the last laugh—it was her highest-charting album to date—and what followed was a pair of records that pushed the envelope even further. It’s been 10 years since Phair released *Funstyle*, a see-what-sticks sort of adventure in experimentalism that traversed everything from Bollywood to hip-hop. In that time, she focused on raising her son while juggling live performances and scoring TV shows—until quarantine, when she felt inspired to pick up where she left. “I cannot \[emphasize\] how weird it was to work on a record in a pandemic,” she tells Apple Music. “There were so many reasons why that ended up being stranger than anyone could have possibly imagined. And in fact, it’s the same as always.” The resulting album speaks to that sentiment, marking a reunion with *Guyville* producer Brad Wood, who brings a pop sheen to a collection of songs rooted in Phair’s DIY beginnings. It’s a record that examines how relationships work, and how distance can manipulate your perceptions of longing and intimacy. Below, Phair walks us through how each song on *Soberish* conveys her view of the world today. **Spanish Doors** “Anyone who’s a fan of my music knows that I’m fascinated by ordinary moments in conversations that somehow take on greater significance in the larger scope of a person’s life—how simply one piece of information can rock your world. And I really resonated with the idea that \[my friend, whose divorce inspired the song\], was in a public place when she found out that she was no longer going to be living the life that she was accustomed to. And how jumbled your internal landscape can be when you’re dealing with denial—‘I don’t want to face this.’ Bargaining, maybe there’s a way out of this. Devastation, in the sense that everything’s going to change and there’s nothing you can do about it. The stages of grief. How can you put that into a pop song? That’s the tricky challenge.” **The Game** “I think most of my romance these days is amped up. It’s not day-to-day, it’s overly large. And sometimes I think ‘The Game’ is really talking about how much you need ordinariness and day-to-dayness in a love relationship. And as exciting as it is to have a kind of a dramatic affair, it gets old, you get tired. You don’t want to keep resurrecting it—you want it to evolve into something more subtle. I think that surprises me.” **Hey Lou** “\[Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson\] are icons to me. Independent of each other, they were huge influences early on in my life. I just loved both of their music when I was a teenager. Both were making groundbreaking, compelling art. And then, when they got together as a couple, it just seemed impossible: How can these two titans coexist in an ordinary life? And it was really an accidental inspiration that turned into a real sort of love letter to two challenging, difficult artists who, by all accounts, had a very peaceful, loving relationship. So, I’m fascinated.” **In There** “It’s like you’ve been saying no to someone for a while and when they start to lose interest because they’ve been rejected a number of times, you’re like, ‘Goddamn it. I miss them.’ And then, you have to break in with your own inability to commit or your own inability to open yourself up to someone. Because for the longest time you could just say no, and you felt like they’d keep coming. And now you are realizing that you’ve said no, and it might be you that has the problem.” **Good Side** “‘Good Side’ is my mature ‘F\*\*k and Run.’ Instead of being in a pithy funk about my hookup, I can just kind of say to myself, ‘Well, he got a pretty good impression of me. So, no harm, no foul.’” **Sheridan Road** “That inspiration came from a longtime partner that also grew up in the same area \[in Chicago\] that I did. And there’s this particular road in it, Sheridan Road, that is the main artery connecting the suburbs to downtown. And every time you want to go home or any time you want to go out, you travel on this road. So, our being together on this road in the song brings up all the different life experiences that we’ve had. And yet, we’ve walked the same walk all our lives, but his life is totally different from mine. He’s got special places and I’ve got special places. How could we have been growing up in the same place the whole time and not have been aware of each other?” **Ba Ba Ba** “I’m hooking up with someone, it’s a new romance, I’m very excited about it. And in the space of a single song, it starts and is already over before it even began. I think of it as a boomerang song, because where you think it’s going and the person you think I am at the beginning of the song is sort of my ambassador self, the more appealing broadly to mainstream people, like, ‘I’m happy. Yay. Woo.’ And then, by the end of the song, I’m back to my usual self and the relationship is already over.” **Soberish** “I feel like we’re all doing the best we can right now. I feel like we, as a country, have gone through a time period that was very dark and difficult and an existential threat, so to speak. So, a lot of people felt the need to stay connected with reality without actually being entirely sober. How much of reality can I stand to absorb and how much do I need to push away from me and keep myself insulated from? ‘Soberish’ is just a more romantic and innocent way to look at that. I used to be the kind of person that could do this sober, but right now I need a shot.” **Soul Sucker** “You know when, if on a certain night, you have a hookup with someone and you like that person and it was perfectly fine, but it was just, like, that night. And then you keep running into them in your real world, and maybe they weren’t the person that you would be most excited for people to see that you hooked up with. You’re in your more elegant persona, and then here comes your hookup from back in the day. And you’re like, ‘I don’t know who this is. I don’t know.’ Like that.” **Lonely Street** “That is a very modern love song, because it sort of speaks to, yes, we can be connected by a screen, but what I really need is for you to be lying next to me, whispering in my ear. And there’s a sense of sadness in the relationship, but also a sense of isolation that we get by in our modern world with a substitute for what we really need, which is actual intimacy.” **Dosage** “I think of it as a modern-day ‘Polyester Bride’ in that I wrote it with the idea of going back to that bar, where Henry the bartender gave me all that good advice when I was young, and coming back as an older woman and seeing a young woman who is basically in the position I used to be in. So, I’m now looking at myself in the younger person who’s wasted, giving her advice, but also saying, ‘By the way, you’re doing fine. Nobody has it all together. Even now, at my age, none of those decisions were even the impactful ones.’” **Bad Kitty** “‘Bad Kitty’ is just embracing the mess that is my life. It’s an ongoing theme I have that I will always be out of place no matter where I go or who I try to be. And the manifestos that people think that I have, or that I have the answers, I really don’t. At the end, it’s the poem of just no helmet, no brake, no net, no rope, no more cocaine. You don’t really believe that I’m never going to do those things, do you? That’s really a kind of a throwing your hands up: I am a bad kitty. To this world, that’s how I am perceived. That’s how I identify myself as. It’s not such a bad thing, really—I get nine more lives. But at the same time, it doesn’t all make sense. It’s my emotional state and that’s how I make art. And it doesn’t always have to make sense. One thing does not have to be like, ‘Now I will never do this, and now I will do this.’” **Rain Scene** “I was here in my house, and I had bought a 3D microphone thing that I can put on my ears that will record surround sound of whatever space I’m in. And I knew I wanted the approaching storm of ‘Sheridan Road’ to break. I wanted the storm to actually release at the end of the album. So, this unexpected rain happened here in Southern California, and I just practically threw clothes on and threw this thing on. And I was, like, yelling to my son, ‘I’m going out in the rain! I’m going to record the rain!’ And I just stomped up and down the street around my house, recording puddles and me splashing in puddles. And I had Brad edit it in such a way that it took on a flavor of synthesizer of manipulated sounds at the end, and then I wrote a little song about it.”

In creating their sixth full-length, highly influential alt-rock trio Failure relied almost exclusively on jamming. “We looked at the past and realized that most of our favorite songs came from jams,” vocalist/guitarist Ken Andrews tells Apple Music. As such, Andrews and his bandmates—bassist Greg Edwards and drummer Kellii Scott—booked a studio for a month and recorded hours upon hours of jam sessions instead of relying on fully or mostly-composed songs. “The plan was to just go in, do not write any songs, do not try to finish anything, don’t even really talk about it,” Andrews says. “Just play.” The next step was to create songs by editing together parts from the jams and adding overdubs where necessary. “The editing actually took almost twice as long as the jamming,” Andrews reveals. “It was two solid months of reaching into the cookie jar and grabbing something. If it tasted good, we would try to turn it into a full song that day.” Below, he comments on each track. **“Water With Hands”** “This was taken from the jams, but we didn’t turn it into a song until we had the majority of the album already done. It’s not technically a reggae rhythm, but there’s a lot of offbeats. From a musical standpoint, that’s a real departure for us. But we edited the performance to create a new arrangement. I really love it because I feel like this song couldn’t exist on any of our other records.” **“Headstand”** “A lot of this song is also sourced from the jams, but what’s different about it is that some of the parts were never played against each other in the practice space. There were some really interesting, happy accidents in editing where we created these new musical things. When you change what plays over each other, you’re really changing everything. But it’s interesting to me that you can take what is essentially 10 to 12 seconds of jam material and spin it off into something as seemingly composed as this song feels. It’s my favorite song on the record.” **“A Lifetime of Joy”** “This one, as it sounds, is a straight lift from the jam sessions—including vocals. It was one of those moments where you’re just faking your way through an idea and it’s kind of just a joke and then it’s over. It’s a minute and a half or two minutes and you’re moving on to the next idea. But then, two or three months later, you hear it and go, ‘That’s actually a song.’ I mean, it’s very short, but it’s a song. And songs don’t have to be long.” **“Submarines”** “This one is pretty worked over. The main fast riff part is definitely from the jams, but one or two of the other sections were entirely written in the overdub or post-jam process, which was three or four months. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around this one right now because it’s one of the songs that had a few different sets of clothes on it over the last year. It went through a lot of different outfit changes. All I know is, when I hear it now, there’s nothing I want to change.” **“Bring Back the Sound”** “This is one of the ones that I presented to the band in a fairly finished form. I had it on acoustic guitar and vocals, and it was very much composed. There was no real jamming of anything. I thought maybe it might sound too songwriter-y and not fit on the record—which is fine, because I have my own outlet doing solo stuff. And so do the other guys, so we’re a lot pickier about what makes it onto a Failure album these days. But I presented it to Greg, and he loved it.” **“Mercury Mouth”** “This is a song that definitely could’ve been on one of the last two records—and I don’t mean that in a bad way. To me, it has a similar feel as those records—especially *The Heart Is a Monster*. We knew we had a solid piece of music in there, but we just had trouble finishing it. I even had my doubts about this one as we were moving into mixing, but by the time we got into mastering, it felt like a good song to have on the record. It’s just a nice moment to kind of rock out again towards the end of the record.” **“Undecided”** “This is kind of the same situation as ‘Bring Back the Sound.’ I composed it and presented it to the band, and there were times when I thought maybe it would be better on a Ken Andrews solo record. But then Greg came up with this sequence of songs when we got to 10, and he made it all make sense and not seem so disjointed.” **“Long Division”** “I think this song has been a long time coming for this band because, to me, it’s like a love song to The Cure’s *Disintegration*. It’s got a really similar tempo, the same kind of super-slow, spacious guitar motif with really long notes—like multiple bars for one note, which Robert Smith is kind of famous for. I even tried to sing like him just a little bit, especially on the first line of the song.” **“Bad Translation”** “This is another song that I have a specific band association with. For ‘Long Division’ it’s The Cure, and for ‘Bad Translation’ it’s Slint. Again, this song comes from a jam. The first half of the intro is how long the initial jam was, and it felt like an unfinished idea. So, we tried to imagine what Slint would do if they finished the song.” **“Half Moon”** “On the last three albums now, Greg has come in with a pretty finished song and it’s awesome, but it doesn’t really fit anywhere except as the closer. This is one of those songs. A lot of times what happens in this band is that either Greg or myself brings in a song and then the other person becomes the producer, basically. I’m looking for Greg to give me input on my compositions, and the same with his. His demo was just guitar and vocal, and it was amazing. I just made a couple of arrangement changes, and here it is.”

First impressions last a lifetime. Wolfgang Van Halen has prepared a lifetime to make his first impression with his solo band Mammoth WVH. The songwriter, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist worked tirelessly on material that would become his debut album. Playing every instrument and singing each and every note, his music presents a personal and powerful perspective, balancing memorable hooks and tight technicality. As many times as audiences have experienced his talent alongside the likes of Tremonti, Clint Lowery, and of course, Van Halen, Wolfgang prepares to step into the spotlight with his own brand - Mammoth WVH - for the very first time now. “The name Mammoth is really special to me.” says Wolf. “Not only was it the name of Van Halen before it became Van Halen, but my father was also the lead singer. Ever since my dad told me this, I always thought that when I grew up, I’d call my own band Mammoth, because I loved the name so much. I’m so thankful that my father was able to listen to, and enjoy the music I made. Nothing made me happier than seeing how proud he was that I was continuing the family legacy.”

In a promo video for Dinosaur Jr.’s 2016 LP *Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not*, singer-songwriter Kurt Vile offered a hearty endorsement as he listened to the album for the very first time: “Riffs, sad lyrics—that’s my Dino,” he said, his daughter seated beside him and his speakers blaring. “That’s the Dino I like.” Five years later, Vile’s formally entered the fray as a co-producer on *Sweep It Into Space*, a follow-up that further reinforces the notion that the legendary indie rock outfit is the rare band to actually improve since reuniting, as they did upon restoring their original lineup in 2005. You can hear touches of Vile’s influence on the off-kilter, piano-driven pop of “Take It Back,” as well as in the bittersweet chimes of first single “I Ran Away,” which sounds like a clear (yet distinctly fuzzy) descendent of Jackson Browne’s 1977 classic “Running on Empty.” But by design, Dino’s 12th full-length delivers and continues to refine exactly what Vile has come to love and anyone who’s paid attention for the last four decades might expect: wave upon strangely comforting wave of J Mascis’ supernatural guitar work (“To Be Waiting”) and natural melancholy (“I Ain’t,” which features loopy backing vocals from Vile), plus a Lou Barlow-penned highlight that ranks among his best (“Garden”).

In 2019, Maxïmo Park found themselves at a crossroads when founding member and keyboardist Lukas Wooller left the band to immigrate to Australia. “Another member of the gang has left,” frontman Paul Smith tells Apple Music. “We knew we would have a very different feel for the next record, and the dynamic between us had changed again. After the sadness of that, we started thinking this is a really good opportunity for us to do something different.” Seizing the opportunity to reinvent themselves, for their seventh LP, Smith and his bandmates recruited Grammy-winning Atlanta producer Ben Allen—who quickly bonded with the trio after visiting them in Newcastle to discuss the project before the pandemic hit. Staggered remote sessions on opposite sides of the Atlantic yielded a body of anthemic guitar music, turning more inward after 2017’s politically charged *Risk to Exist*. “You want to give people that pop thrill that hooks you in immediately,” Smith says. “Hopefully, there\'s something a little bit mysterious or emotional that has depth, too.” Read on for Smith\'s track-by-track guide. **Partly of My Making** “It\'s about priorities shifting. We try and wrong-foot people a little bit, and I think me singing about losing luminosity and getting older while this totally rocking, uplifting song comes on with all of these buoyant strings is a little bit of a joke. It\'s me saying, \'I\'ve lost it a bit,\' and then saying, \'Not really.\'” **Versions of You** “As a new dad, I wanted to try and write about my daughter in a positive way and about parenthood in a negative way—because there are lots of ups and downs. I look at lots of pictures and videos when I\'m away from home, as people do when they\'re away from their loved ones. And in some senses, these moments are very detached from who you are and what you\'re doing right now. And in the end, the only thing you can think of is how that person is right now, or the last time that you saw that person.” **Baby, Sleep** “The approach was to focus on sleep deprivation, though make it quite fun. I remember watching *Dazed and Confused* and NBA basketball, which I usually can\'t watch live. So yeah, all of those things kind of popped into the song, and the usual sort of TV shows where you have people telling you what they think about politics and you think, like, \'What are these buffoons doing in my front room?\'” **Placeholder** “It’s that idea of having one last opportunity and saying, ‘Let\'s have one more go, and we\'ll try and make the shot.’ I think that\'s one thing that is typical of Maxïmo Park, that kind of bittersweet quality.” **All of Me** “We actually collaborated with Ben on this one, and he sent us a demo which had this amazing keyboard riff. That allowed me, as a songwriter, to contrast the big emotions of the chorus with the more statement aspect of the song. You can make it into something more domestic and family-oriented, but it\'s this idea of ordinary life being exciting and romantic.” **Ardour (feat. Pauline Murray)** “We were out for a curry with Ben when he came over to Newcastle before the record was made, and Pauline Murray of Penetration and The Invisible Girls was there. We didn\'t ever think about asking her to sing with us, possibly because we\'re maybe a bit too reverent of her. She takes it somewhere else and does enhance the sort of punk vibe. But again, that idea of domestic life being quite hard, Pauline\'s got two kids and has definitely felt those kind of feelings that are in the song. It just adds an emotional heft to the song, I think.” **Meeting Up** “It\'s looking back at a sort of former life and thinking, \'Am I still part of this?\' There\'s a few lyrics that cross over on this record. And on this one, it talks about the prefabricated buildings that are bound to outlive me. They were temporary housing, and they\'re still there. In our song \'Write This Down,\' it has the word \'prefabricated\' in it, because that song was about partially listening to Prefab Sprout, one of my favorite bands.” **Why Must a Building Burn?** “It\'s about empathy, as a lot of our music is. One of our old merchandise sellers, Nick, was involved in the Bataclan tragedy and was killed. I saw his photograph on the news in our country, and I couldn\'t quite believe what I was seeing. These are human people, they\'re not just statistics and names and demographics; they\'re people who meant something. It connected with the idea of what do I want to do with my life, and how do I want to remember people. It became a tribute to living life and commemorating somebody that you love.” **I Don’t Know What I’m Doing** “When Duncan \[Lloyd, Maxïmo Park guitarist\] sends me a song, I just try and tap into the atmosphere of what he\'s doing. This was one of those songs where I just sang at the top of my voice, and at the end of the song I\'m almost barking like a dog. I sent them all through to Ben in Atlanta and said, \'Do what you want with them.\' The song retains that kind of vitality and first-takeness, probably because I can\'t actually do it more than two or three times without my voice disappearing entirely.” **The Acid Remark** “The title reminded me of some sort of short story, and so I tried to go with that for the rest of the song. I felt like I wanted to leave it fairly mysterious, but also give people a sense of it being a romantic, perhaps more youthful song. My own domestic life is quite settled, and I was using my own errant youth as a sort of springboard for this one.” **Feelings I’m Supposed to Feel** “Now that I\'ve had a child, I want to be well and I want to see as much of her life as possible and be there for her. People do try and say that by 40 you should be settled and have your own house, or by 20 you should be at university. From whatever background you\'re from, you\'ll have these kind of societal norms that you\'re supposed to subscribe to. And I find that quite oppressive, really. I\'ve always tried to disengage myself from them, and yet I live a normal life. I\'m subject to all of those different pressures everybody else is.” **Child of the Flatlands** “It\'s a song about childhood and how much I cherish those places on the outskirts of town where things don\'t quite fit together, and nature has made a bit of a comeback and taken over and reclaimed its former territory. We plucked the line \'nature always wins\' from this song to represent the album, because we felt that it does refer to the natural world and how we\'re at nature\'s mercy a lot of the time—whether it\'s California wildfires and big freezes in Texas or earthquakes in Mexico. Climate change and all of those things are very real. Sometimes, we just have to accept that we\'re the smaller guy in this fight.”

There\'s power in reclamation, and Jazmine Sullivan leans into every bit of it on *Heaux Tales*. The project, her fourth overall and first in six years, takes the content and casual candor of a group chat and unpacks them across songs and narrative, laying waste to the patriarchal good girl/bad girl dichotomy in the process. It\'s as much about “hoes” as it is the people who both benefit from and are harmed by the notion. Pleasure takes center stage from the very beginning; “Bodies” captures the inner monologue of the moments immediately after a drunken hookup with—well, does it really matter? The who is irrelevant to the why, as Sullivan searches her mirror for accountability. “I keep on piling on bodies on bodies on bodies, yeah, you getting sloppy, girl, I gotta stop getting fucked up.” The theme reemerges throughout, each time towards a different end, as short spoken interludes thread it all together. “Put It Down” offers praise for the men who only seem to be worthy of it in the bedroom (because who among us hasn\'t indulged in or even enabled the carnal delights of those who offer little else beyond?), while “On It,” a pearl-clutching duet with Ari Lennox, unfolds like a three-minute sext sung by two absolute vocal powerhouses. Later, she cleverly inverts the sentiment but maintains the artistic dynamism on a duet with H.E.R., replacing the sexual confidence with a missive about how “it ain\'t right how these hoes be winning.” The singing is breathtaking—textbooks could be filled on the way Sullivan brings emotionality into the tone and texture of voice, as on the devastating lead single “Lost One”—but it\'d be erroneous to ignore the lyrics and what these intra- and interpersonal dialogues expose. *Heaux Tales* not only highlights the multitudes of many women, it suggests the multitudes that can exist within a single woman, how virtue and vulnerability thrive next to ravenous desire and indomitability. It stands up as a portrait of a woman, painted by the brushes of several, who is, at the end of it all, simply doing the best she can—trying to love and protect herself despite a world that would prefer she do neither.

“This record is very much an homage to the loved ones that I\'ve lost,” The Pretty Reckless vocalist/guitarist Taylor Momsen tells Apple Music about their fourth studio LP. “But it\'s also very much a reflection of my life written from a very personal and intimate perspective of where I was at and what I was going through.” In May 2017, the New York City four-piece was left stunned by the untimely death of Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell while supporting the grunge pioneers on tour in Detroit, Michigan. Shaken by this tragic incident, Momsen, who considered Cornell a mentor and a friend, came to the conclusion that she was not in a good place and needed to take a step back and grieve privately. As she was coming to terms with what had happened, Momsen suffered another blow when she learned that the band’s longtime producer Kato Khandwala had died tragically in a motorcycle accident. At her wit’s end, Momsen fell into a spiral of depression and substance abuse. Momsen’s love of music is what started to pull her out of that dark place—starting with The Beatles, the first band she ever heard, and coming back around to Soundgarden when it brought her joy to listen to them again. She picked up her guitar and started to play. “I think that was the start of where I started to see a spark come back into my eye, a little bit of light,” Momsen says. “Clichéd as it may sound, music very literally saved my life. I had been repressing so much of myself, and everything that I was going through, that by the time I even attempted to creep that door open, the floodgates just poured out in this uncontrollable way.” Read on as Momsen takes us inside some of the album’s key tracks. **Death by Rock and Roll** “I think that it was very important for me that ‘Death by Rock and Roll’ is the opening song on the record. The first thing you hear when you push play is actually a recording of Kato\'s footsteps walking down the hallway of the House of Loud, the studio where we recorded our first album *Light Me Up*. I don\'t want to compliment myself, but it does sound like a rock ’n’ roll anthem and this battle about your life.” **Only Love Can Save Me Now (feat. Matt Cameron & Kim Thayil)** “When I finished it and we had done a rough sketch of it in the studio, as it was coming together, it had this Soundgarden-esque overtone to it. I just thought that Matt and Kim, being the incredible and unique musicians that they are, would add such a dimension to it that we weren\'t able to create ourselves. We flew to Seattle and recorded it at London Bridge Studios, which is where Soundgarden recorded *Louder Than Love* and Pearl Jam recorded *Ten* back in the day. I don\'t want to speak for them, but for me, it was this very, very beautiful full-circle moment of creating something new after all the hell.” **25** “I wrote it before turning 25, and we recorded it shortly after my birthday. I think that I was at a very low point in my life. But I was also at a very reflective point, as probably a lot of people are around a birthday. It’s a very autobiographical one in a lot of ways. When I finished writing it, I took a step back from it for a second. There was no one else in the room. I just went, ‘I think I might\'ve gotten better. I think this might be really good.’ Certainly it was a turning point for myself as a songwriter and also for myself as a person. It was me saying to myself, \'Taylor, you need to get your shit together.\' It\'s the first indication on the record that there is light at the end of this very dark tunnel.”

After two critically acclaimed albums about loss and mourning and a *New York Times* best-selling memoir, Michelle Zauner—the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter known as Japanese Breakfast—wanted release. “I felt like I’d done the grief work for years and was ready for something new,” she tells Apple Music. “I was ready to celebrate *feeling*.” Her third album *Jubilee* is unguardedly joyful—neon synths, bubblegum-pop melodies, gusts of horns and strings—and delights in largesse; her arrangements are sweeping and intricate, her subjects complex. Occasionally, as on “Savage Good Boy” and “Kokomo, IN,” she uses fictional characters to illustrate meta-narratives around wealth, corruption, independence, and selfhood. “Album three is your chance to think big,” she says, pointing to Kate Bush and Björk, who released what she considers quintessential third albums: “Theatrical, ambitious, musical, surreal.” Below, Zauner explains how she reconciled her inner pop star with her desire to stay “extremely weird” and walks us through her new album track by track. **“Paprika”** “This song is the perfect thesis statement for the record because it’s a huge, ambitious monster of a song. We actually maxed out the number of tracks on the Pro Tools session because we used everything that could possibly be used on it. It\'s about reveling in the beauty of music.” **“Be Sweet”** “Back in 2018, I decided to try out writing sessions for the first time, and I was having a tough go of it. My publisher had set me up with Jack Tatum of Wild Nothing. What happens is they lie to you and say, ‘Jack loves your music and wants you to help him write his new record!’ And to him they’d say, ‘Michelle *loves* Wild Nothing, she wants to write together!’ Once we got together we were like, ‘I don\'t need help. I\'m not writing a record.’ So we decided we’d just write a pop song to sell and make some money. We didn’t have anyone specific in mind, we just knew it wasn’t going to be for either of us. Of course, once we started putting it together, I realized I really loved it. I think the distance of writing it for ‘someone else’ allowed me to take on this sassy \'80s women-of-the-night persona. To me, it almost feels like a Madonna, Whitney Houston, or Janet Jackson song.” **“Kokomo, IN”** “This is my favorite song off of the album. It’s sung from the perspective of a character I made up who’s this teenage boy in Kokomo, Indiana, and he’s saying goodbye to his high school sweetheart who is leaving. It\'s sort of got this ‘Wouldn\'t It Be Nice’ vibe, which I like, because Kokomo feels like a Beach Boys reference. Even though the song is rooted in classic teenage feelings, it\'s also very mature; he\'s like, ‘You have to go show the world all the parts of you that I fell so hard for.’ It’s about knowing that you\'re too young for this to be *it*, and that people aren’t meant to be kept by you. I was thinking back to how I felt when I was 18, when things were just so all-important. I personally was *not* that wise; I would’ve told someone to stay behind. So I guess this song is what I wish I would’ve said.” **“Slide Tackle”** “‘Slide Tackle’ was such a fussy bitch. I had a really hard time figuring out how to make it work. Eventually it devolved into, of all things, a series of solos, but I really love it. It started with a drumbeat that I\'d made in Ableton and a bassline I was trying to turn into a Future Islands-esque dance song. That sounded too simple, so I sent it to Ryan \[Galloway\] from Crying, who wrote all these crazy, math-y guitar parts. Then I got Adam Schatz, who plays in the band Landlady, to provide an amazing saxophone solo. After that, I stepped away from the song for like a year. When I finally relistened to it, it felt right. It’s about the way those of us who are predisposed to darker thoughts have to sometimes physically wrestle with our minds to feel joy.” **“Posing in Bondage”** “Jack Tatum helped me turn this song into this fraught, delicate ballad. The end of it reminds me of Drake\'s ‘Hold On, We\'re Going Home’; it has this drive-y, chill feeling. This song is about the bondage of controlled desire, and the bondage of monogamy—but in a good way.” **“Sit”** “This song is also about controlled desire, or our ability to lust for people and not act on it. Navigating monogamy and desire is difficult, but it’s also a normal human condition. Those feelings don’t contradict loyalty, you know? The song is shaped around this excellent keyboard line that \[bandmate\] Craig \[Hendrix\] came up with after listening to Tears for Fears. The chorus reminds me of heaven and the verses remind me of hell. After these dark and almost industrial bars, there\'s this angelic light that breaks through.” **“Savage Good Boy”** “This one was co-produced by Alex G, who is one of my favorite musicians of all time, and was inspired by a headline I’d read about billionaires buying bunkers. I wanted to write it from the perspective of a billionaire who’d bought one, and who was coaxing a woman to come live with him as the world burned around them. I wanted to capture what that level of self-validation looks like—that rationalization of hoarding wealth.” **“In Hell”** “This might be the saddest song I\'ve ever written. It\'s a companion song to ‘In Heaven’ off of *Psychopomp*, because it\'s about the same dog. But here, I\'m putting that dog down. It was actually written in the *Soft Sounds* era as a bonus track for the Japanese release, but I never felt like it got its due.” **“Tactics”** “I knew I wanted to make a beautiful, sweet, big ballad, full of strings and groovy percussion, and Craig, who co-produced it, added this feel-good Bill Withers, Randy Newman vibe. I think the combination is really fabulous.” **“Posing for Cars”** “I love a long, six-minute song to show off a little bit. It starts off as an understated acoustic guitar ballad that reminded me of Wilco’s ‘At Least That\'s What You Said,’ which also morphs from this intimate acoustic scene before exploding into a long guitar solo. To me, it always has felt like Jeff Tweedy is saying everything that can\'t be said in that moment through his instrument, and I loved that idea. I wanted to challenge myself to do the same—to write a long, sprawling, emotional solo where I expressed everything that couldn\'t be said with words.”

Here’s what a typical day of lockdown looked like for Courtney Barnett in 2020: “Wake up, watch the sunrise, do some meditating, drink some coffee, do some work and then some songwriting,” she tells Apple Music. “Go for a walk, call a friend, then some more work.” Living alone in a friend’s empty Melbourne apartment, Barnett found herself in a reflective mood, often watching the world and seasons change from her window, a guitar in her lap. “A lot of the time there wasn\'t much else to do,” she says. “But I think it\'s good sometimes to just sit and watch or listen, to take a minute.” Written in the quiet of hotel rooms or that very apartment, Barnett’s intimate third LP is a set of meditative rock that feels uniquely present, the Aussie singer-songwriter playing like she’s got nowhere to go and nowhere else she’d rather be. It’s music that feels akin—spiritually and sonically—to that of one-time collaborator Kurt Vile, a placid coming together of jangly guitars, purring drum machines, and zen turn of phrase. “I feel that quietness is often a reflection of the writing, but also I think that I was just craving a quieter sound,” she says of the album. “I\'ve gotten used to just taking things as they come over the years. Nothing is ever how you think it\'s going to be, so it\'s just trying to live in those moments and make the most of them.” Here, Barnett guides us through a few of the album’s songs. **“Rae Street”** “The chorus \[‘Time is money and money is no man’s friend’\] is something that I remember from my childhood, something my dad would say as a bit of a joke, as a hurry-up if we were late for school or whatever. It\'s just always stuck in my head, and when I reflected on it as an adult, it took on a whole new meaning, especially in the context of last year when the world slowed down or stopped in some places, and people lost jobs.” **“Sunfair Sundown”** “That was inspired by a party with friends—one of those nights you feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for friendship and connection. I started writing it the next day, just because of that overwhelming, beautiful, big feeling—it was that simple. It was just celebrating very special small moments and the fact that small moments can mean so much. Sometimes, to one person, it\'s just another day, but it could totally change or affect someone else\'s life.” **“Here’s the Thing”** “I just remember when I wrote that song, it felt special straight away. The guitar chords and the melody—it all came quite naturally and quickly. It started as a letter and then it turned into a song, and over time it’s morphed, as songs do. It’s constantly evolving. I just think it\'s such a simple, beautiful song—I feel a lot when I play it.” **“Turning Green”** “Starting out, we did this whole version that sounded like a jangly guitar-pop song. But it didn\'t grab me, so we pulled it apart and \[Warpaint drummer\] Stella \[Mozgawa\] reprogrammed some drums. I put the guitar down because it just didn\'t seem like it fit, and we kind of flipped it on its head to see if it would inspire a better feeling. And it did, straight away—just singing along to it made the words come to life in a different way. Sometimes, in the studio, you just want to throw so much stuff onto songs and it just gets crowded and busy, and then you kind of lose track of what\'s happening. The change gave the words space and that space was really important for a lot of this album, but this song especially.” **“Write a List of Things to Look Forward To”** “The song’s title came from someone saying, ‘You should write a list of things that you\'re looking forward to.’ And that just inspired the thought behind it—what that means and what it represents. It’s a song about gratitude, but it is also about connections in life, this idea of life and death and being afraid of it and just being at peace with that progression.”

Madvillain superfans will no doubt recall the Four Tet 2005 remix EP stuffed with inventive versions of cuts from the now-certified classic rap album *Madvillainy*. Coming a decade and a half later, *Sound Ancestors* sees Kieran Hebden link once again with iconic hip-hop producer Madlib, this time for a set of all-new material, the product of a years-long and largely remote collaboration process. With source material arranged, edited, and recontextualized by the UK-born artist, the album represents a truly unique shared vision, exemplified by the reggae-tinged boom-bap of “Theme De Crabtree” and the neo-soul-infused clatter of “Dirtknock.” Such genre blends turn these 16 tracks into an excitingly twisty journey through both men’s seemingly boundless creativity, leading to the lithe jazz-hop of “Road of the Lonely Ones” and the rugged B-boy business of “Riddim Chant.”

\"I knew this day was coming,\" Rivers Cuomo tells Apple Music. \"I\'ve always been such a fan of classical music and opera. And yet, I feel like it\'s overdue, like I just kind of got stuck in this pattern of, \'Okay, we\'re a rock band. This is what we do. We don\'t want to get soft too soon.\' But really getting encouragement from \[producer\] Jake \[Sinclair\], and then just a light went off like, \'Oh, this is going to be great.\'\" After delaying the release of their long-promised shred opus *Van Weezer*, Weezer instead dove into *OK Human*, a 12-track change of pace that features a 38-piece orchestra, no click tracks, no computers, and, most surprisingly, no electric guitar. And the tonal shift matched the pandemic neuroses that fueled Cuomo\'s lyric writing. \"I\'m so anxious about looking around my house and seeing, okay, there\'s one child on that device, there\'s the other child on that device, my wife\'s over there on that device,\" Cuomo says. \"Everyone\'s looking in a different direction at a different device, and that\'s the way things are going. Nothing I can do about it, but I just can\'t help but feel a sense of loss and anxiety about it.\" Those worries take center stage on whimsical tracks like \"All My Favorite Songs,\" \"Playing My Piano,\" and \"Screens,\" while the sprawling orchestration adds drama to \"Numbers\" and \"Bird With a Broken Wing\" as Cuomo stares down his inadequacies. \"I was just feeling pretty irrelevant and passed over and past my prime,\" says the 50-year-old singer-songwriter. \"I was feeling pretty sorry for myself.\" It\'s not all dark clouds, however—Weezer fashions a sliver of optimism with the triumphant \"Here Comes the Rain\" and luscious closer \"La Brea Tar Pits.\" \"Hearing it back for the first time with the orchestra, it\'s like, yeah, those are the chords I wrote, and that\'s the melody I wrote,\" Cuomo says. \"But man, it\'s like seeing in three dimensions for the first time or something. It\'s just gorgeous. And I can\'t believe we haven\'t done it before.\"

“Everybody is scared of death or ultimate oblivion, whether you want to admit it or not,” Julien Baker tells Apple Music. “That’s motivated by a fear of uncertainty, of what’s beyond our realm of understanding—whatever it feels like to be dead or before we\'re born, that liminal space. It\'s the root of so much escapism.” On her third full-length, Baker embraces fuller arrangements and a full-band approach, without sacrificing any of the intimacy that galvanized her earlier work. The result is at once a cathartic and unabashedly bleak look at how we distract ourselves from the darkness of voids both large and small, universal and personal. “It was easier to just write for the means of sifting through personal difficulties,” she says. “There were a lot of paradigm shifts in my understanding of the world in 2019 that were really painful. I think one of the easiest ways to overcome your pain is to assign significance to it. But sometimes, things are awful with no explanation, and to intellectualize them kind of invalidates the realness of the suffering. I just let things be sad.” Here, the Tennessee singer-songwriter walks us through the album track by track. **Hardline** “It’s more of a confession booth song, which a lot of these are. I feel like whenever I imagine myself in a pulpit, I don\'t have a lot to say that\'s honest or useful. And when I imagine myself in a position of disclosing, in order to bring me closer to a person, that\'s when I have a lot to say.” **Heatwave** “I wrote it about being stuck in traffic and having a full-on panic attack. But what was causing the delay was just this car that had a factory defect and bomb-style exploded. I was like, ‘Man, someone got incinerated. A family maybe.’ The song feels like a fall, but it\'s born from the second verse where I feel like I\'m just walking around with my knees in gravel or whatever the verse in Isaiah happens to be: the willing submission to suffering and then looking around at all these people\'s suffering, thinking that is a huge obstacle to my faith and my understanding, this insanity and unexplainable hurt that we\'re trying to heal with ideology instead of action.” **Faith Healer** “I have an addictive personality and I understand it\'s easy for me to be an escapist with substances because I literally missed being high. That was a real feeling that I felt and a feeling that felt taboo to say outside of conversations with other people in recovery. The more that I looked at the space that was left by substance or compulsion that I\'ve then just filled with something else, the more I realized that this is a recurring problem in my personality. And so many of the things that I thought about myself that were noble or ultimately just my pursuit of knowing God and the nature of God—that craving and obsession is trying to assuage the same pain that alcohol or any prescription medication is.” **Relative Fiction** “The identity that I have worked so hard to cultivate as a good person or a kind person is all basically just my own homespun mythology about myself that I\'m trying to use to inspire other people to be kinder to each other. Maybe what\'s true about me is true about other people, but this song specifically is a ruthless evaluation of myself and what I thought made me principled. It\'s kind of a fool\'s errand.” **Crying Wolf** “It\'s documenting what it feels like to be in a cyclical relationship, particularly with substances. There was a time in my life, for almost a whole year, where it felt like that. I think that is a very real place that a lot of people who struggle with substance use find themselves in, where the resolution of every day is the same and you just can’t seem to make it stick.” **Bloodshot** “The very first line of the song is talking about two intoxicated people—myself being one of them—looking at each other and me having this out-of-body experience, knowing that we are both bringing to our perception of the other what we need the other person to be. That\'s a really lonely and sad place to be in, the realization that we\'re each just kind of sculpting our own mythologies about the world, crafting our narratives.” **Ringside** “I have a few tics that manifest themselves with my anxiety and OCD, and for a long time, I would just straight-up punch myself in the head—and I would do it onstage. It\'s this extension of physicality from something that\'s fundamentally compulsive that you can\'t control. I can\'t stop myself from doing that, and I feel really embarrassed about it. And for some reason I also can\'t stop myself from doing other kinds of more complicated self-punishment, like getting into codependent relationships and treating each one of those like a lottery ticket. Like, \'Maybe this one will work out.\'” **Favor** “I have a friend whose parents live in Jackson, where my parents live. They’re one of my closest friends and they were around for the super dark part of 2019. I\'ll try to talk to the person who I hurt or I\'ll try to admit the wrongdoing that I\'ve done. I\'ll feel so much guilt about it that I\'ll cry. And then I\'ll hate that I\'ve cried because now it seems manipulative. I\'m self-conscious about looking like I hate myself too much for the wrong things I\'ve done because then I kind of steal the person\'s right to be angry. I don\'t want to cry my way out of shit.” **Song in E** “I would rather you shout at me like an equal and allow me to inhabit this imagined persona I have where I\'m evil. Because then, if I can confirm that you hate me and that I\'m evil and I\'ve failed, then I don\'t any longer have to deal with the responsibility of trying to be good. I don\'t any longer have to be saddled with accountability for hurting you as a friend. It’s something not balancing in the arithmetic of my brain, for sin and retribution, for crime and punishment. And it indebts you to a person and ties you to them to be forgiven.” **Repeat** “I tried so hard for so long not to write a tour song, because that\'s an experience that musicians always write about that\'s kind of inaccessible to people who don\'t tour. We were in Germany and I was thinking: Why did I choose this? Why did I choose to rehash the most emotionally loaded parts of my life on a stage in front of people? But that\'s what rumination is. These are the pains I will continue to experience, on some level, because they\'re familiar.” **Highlight Reel** “I was in the back of a cab in New York City and I started having a panic attack and I had to get out and walk. The highlight reel that I\'m talking about is all of my biggest mistakes, and that part—‘when I die, you can tell me how much is a lie’—is when I retrace things that I have screwed up in my life. I can watch it on an endless loop and I can torture myself that way. Or I can try to extract the lessons, however painful, and just assimilate those into my trying to be better. That sounds kind of corny, but it\'s really just, what other options do you have except to sit there and stare down all your mistakes every night and every day?” **Ziptie** “I was watching people be restrained with zip ties on the news. It\'s just such a visceral image of violence to see people put restraints on another human being—on a demonstrator, on a person who is mentally ill, on a person who is just minding their own business, on a person who is being racially profiled. I had a dark, funny thought that\'s like, what if God could go back and be like, ‘Y\'all aren\'t going to listen.’ Jesus sacrificed himself and everybody in the United States seems to take that as a true fact, and then shoot people in cold blood in the street. I was just like, ‘Why?’ When will you call off the quest to change people that are so horrid to each other?”

In the wake of 2017’s *MASSEDUCTION*, St. Vincent mastermind Annie Clark was in search of change. “That record was very much about structure and stricture—everything I wore was very tight, very controlled, very angular,” she tells Apple Music. “But there\'s only so far you can go with that before you\'re like, ‘Oh, what\'s over here?’” What Clark found was a looseness that came from exploring sounds she’d grown up with, “this kind of early-’70s, groove-ish, soul-ish, jazz-ish style in my head since I was a little kid,” she says. “I was raised on Steely Dan records and Stevie Wonder records like \[1973’s\] *Innervisions* and \[1972’s\] *Talking Book* and \[1974’s\] *Fulfillingness’ First Finale*. That was the wheelhouse that I wanted to play in. I wanted to make new stories with older sounds.” Recorded with *MASSEDUCTION* producer Jack Antonoff, *Daddy’s Home* draws heavily from the 1970s, but its title was inspired, in part, by recent events in Clark’s personal life: her father’s 2019 release from prison, where he’d served nearly a decade for his role in a stock manipulation scheme. It’s as much about our capacity to evolve as it is embracing the humanity in our flaws. “I wanted to make sure that even if anybody didn\'t know my personal autobiography that it would be open to interpretation as to whether Daddy is a father or Daddy is a boyfriend or Daddy is a pimp—I wanted that to be ambiguous,” she says. “Part of the title is literal: ‘Yeah, here he is, he\'s home!’ And then another part of it is ‘It’s 10 years later. I’ve done a lot in those 10 years. I have responsibility. I have shit I\'m seriously doing. It’s playing with it: Am I daddy\'s girl? I don\'t know. Maybe. But I\'m also Daddy, too, now.” Here, Clark guides us through a few of the album’s key tracks. **“Pay Your Way in Pain”** “This character is like the fixture in a 2021 psychedelic blues. And this is basically the sentiment of the blues: truly just kind of being down and out in a country, in a society, that oftentimes asks you to choose between dignity and survival. So it\'s just this story of one really bad fuckin’ day. And just owning the fact that truly what everybody wants in the world, with rare exception, is just to have a roof over their head, to be loved, and to get by. The line about the heels always makes me laugh. I\'ve been her, I know her. I\'ve been the one who people kind of go, ‘Oh, oh, dear. Hide the children\'s eyes.’ I know her, and I know her well.” **“Down and Out Downtown”** “This is actually maybe my favorite song on the record. I don\'t know how other people will feel about it. We\'ve all been that person who is wearing last night\'s heels at eight in the morning on the train, processing: ‘Oh, where have we been? What did I just do?’ You\'re groggy, you\'re sort of trying to avoid the knowing looks from other people—and the way that in New York, especially, you can just really ride that balance between like abandon and destruction. That\'s her; I\'ve been her too.” **“Daddy\'s Home”** “The story is really about one of the last times I went to go visit my dad in prison. If I was in national press or something, they put the press clippings on his bed. And if I was on TV, they\'d gather around in the common area and watch me be on Letterman or whatever. So some of the inmates knew who I was and presumably, I don\'t know, mentioned it to their family members. I ended up signing an autograph on a receipt because you can\'t bring phones and you couldn\'t do a selfie. It’s about watching the tables turn a little bit, from father and daughter. It\'s a complicated story and there\'s every kind of emotion about it. My family definitely chose to look at a lot of things with some gallows humor, because what else are you going to do? It\'s absolutely absurd and heartbreaking and funny all at the same time. So: Worth putting into a song.” **“Live in the Dream”** “If there are other touchpoints on the record that hint at psychedelia, on this one we\'ve gone completely psychedelic. I was having a conversation with Jack and he was telling me about a conversation he had with Bruce Springsteen. Bruce was just, I think anecdotally, talking about the game of fame and talking about the fact that we lose a lot of people to it. They can kind of float off into the atmosphere, and the secret is, you can\'t let the dream take over you. The dream has to live inside of you. And I thought that was wonderful, so I wrote this song as if you\'re waking up from a dream and you almost have these sirens talking to you. In life, there\'s still useful delusions. And then there\'s delusions that—if left unchecked—lead to kind of a misuse of power.” **“Down”** “The song is a revenge fantasy. If you\'re nice, people think they can take advantage of you. And being nice is not the same thing as being a pushover. If we don\'t want to be culpable to something, we could say, \'Well, it\'s definitely just this thing in my past,\' but at the end of the day, there\'s human culpability. Life is complicated, but I don\'t care why you are hurt. It\'s not an excuse to be cruel. Whatever your excuse is, you\'ve played it out.” **“…At the Holiday Party”** “Everybody\'s been this person at one time. I\'ve certainly been this person, where you are masking your sadness with all kinds of things. Whether it\'s dressing up real fancy or talking about that next thing you\'re going to do, whatever it is. And we kind of reveal ourselves by the things we try to hide and to kind of say we\'ve all been there. Drunk a little too early, at a party, there\'s a moment where you can see somebody\'s face break, and it\'s just for a split second, but you see it. That was the little window into what\'s going on with you, and what you\'re using to obfuscate is actually revealing you.”

Lucy Dacus’ favorite songs are “the ones that take 15 minutes to write,” she tells Apple Music. “I\'m easily convinced that the song is like a unit when it comes out in one burst. In many ways, I feel out of control, like it\'s not my decision what I write.” On her third LP, the Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter surrenders to autobiography with a set of spare and intimate indie rock that combines her memory of growing up in Richmond, Virginia, with details she pulled from journals she’s kept since she was 7, much of it shaped by her religious upbringing. It’s as much about what we remember as how and why we remember it. “The record was me looking at my past, but now when I hear them it\'s almost like the songs are a part of the past, like a memory about memory,” she says. “This must be what I was ready to do, and I have to trust that. There\'s probably stuff that has happened to me that I\'m still not ready to look at and I just have to wait for the day that I am.” Here, she tells us the story behind every song on the album. **“Hot & Heavy”** “My first big tour in 2016—after my first record came out—was two and a half months, and at the very end of it, I broke up with my partner at the time. I came back to Richmond after being gone for the longest I\'d ever been away and everything felt different: people’s perception of me; my friend group; my living situation. I was, for the first time, not comfortable in Richmond, and I felt really sad about that because I had planned on being here my whole life. This song is about returning to where you grew up—or where you spent any of your past—and being hit with an onslaught of memories. I think of my past self as a separate person, so the song is me speaking to me. It’s realizing that at one point in my life, everything was ahead of me and my life could\'ve ended up however. It still can, but it\'s like now I know the secret.” **“Christine”** “It starts with a scene that really happened. Me and my friend were sitting in the backseat and she\'s asleep on my shoulder. We’re coming home from a sermon that was about how humans are evil and children especially need to be guided or else they\'ll fall into the hands of the devil. She was dating this guy who at the time was just not treating her right, and I played her the song. I was like, ‘I just want you to hear this once. I\'ll put it away, but you should know that I would not support you if you get married. I don\'t think that this is the best you could do.’ She took it to heart, but she didn\'t actually break up with the guy. They\'re still together and he\'s changed and they\'ve changed and I don\'t feel that way anymore. I feel like they\'re in a better place, but at the time it felt very urgent to me that she get out of that situation.” **“First Time”** “I was on a kind of fast-paced walk and I started singing to myself, which is how I write most of my songs. I had all this energy and I started jogging for no reason, which, if you know me, is super not me—I would not electively jog. I started writing about that feeling when you\'re in love for the first time and all you think about is the one person and how you find access to yourself through them. I paused for a second because I was like, ‘Do I really want to talk about early sexual experiences? No, just do it. If you don\'t like it, don\'t share it.’ It’s about discovery: your body and your emotional capacity and how you\'re never going to feel it that way you did the first time again. At the time, I was very worried that I\'d never feel that way again. The truth was, I haven’t—but I have felt other wonderful things.” **“VBS”** “I don\'t want my identity to be that I used to believe in God because I didn\'t even choose that, but it\'s inextricable to who I am and my upbringing. I like that in the song, the setting is \[Vacation Bible School\], but the core of the song is about a relationship. My first boyfriend, who I met at VBS, used to snort nutmeg. He was a Slayer fan and it was contentious in our relationship because he loved Slayer even more than God and I got into Slayer thinking, ‘Oh, maybe he\'ll get into God.’ He was one of the kids that went to church but wasn\'t super into it, whereas I was defining my whole life by it. But I’ve got to thank him for introducing me to Slayer and The Cure, which had the biggest impact on me.” **“Cartwheel”** “I was taking a walk with \[producer\] Collin \[Pastore\] and as we passed by his school, I remembered all of the times that I was forced to play dodgeball, and how the heat in Richmond would get so bad that it would melt your shoes. That memory ended up turning into this song, about how all my girlfriends at that age were starting to get into boys before I wanted to and I felt so panicked. Why are we sneaking boys into the sleepover? They\'re not even talking. We were having fun and now no one is playing with me anymore. When my best friend told me when she had sex for the first time, I felt so betrayed. I blamed it on God, but really it was personal, because I knew that our friendship was over as I knew it, and it was.” **“Thumbs”** “I was in the car on the way to dinner in Nashville. We were going to a Thai restaurant, meeting up with some friends, and I just had my notepad out. Didn\'t notice it was happening, and then wrote the last line, ‘You don\'t owe him shit,’ and then I wrote it down a second time because I needed to hear it for myself. My birth father is somebody that doesn\'t really understand boundaries, and I guess I didn\'t know that I believed that, that I didn\'t owe him anything, until I said it out loud. When we got to the restaurant, I felt like I was going to throw up, and so they all went into the restaurant, got a table, and I just sat there and cried. Then I gathered myself and had some pad thai.” **“Going Going Gone”** “I stayed up until like 1:00 am writing this cute little song on the little travel guitar that I bring on tour. I thought for sure I\'d never put it on a record because it\'s so campfire-ish. I never thought that it would fit tonally on anything, but I like the meaning of it. It\'s about the cycle of boys and girls, then men and women, and then fathers and daughters, and how fathers are protective of their daughters potentially because as young men they either witnessed or perpetrated abuse. Or just that men who would casually assault women know that their daughters are in danger of that, and that\'s maybe why they\'re so protective. I like it right after ‘Thumbs’ because it\'s like a reprieve after the heaviest point on the record.” **“Partner in Crime”** “I tried to sing a regular take and I was just sounding bad that day. We did Auto-Tune temporarily, but then we loved it so much we just kept it. I liked that it was a choice. The meaning of the song is about this relationship I had when I was a teenager with somebody who was older than me, and how I tried to act really adult in order to relate or get that person\'s respect. So Auto-Tune fits because it falsifies your voice in order to be technically more perfect or maybe more attractive.” **“Brando”** “I really started to know about older movies in high school, when I met this one friend who the song is about. I feel like he was attracted to anything that could give him superiority—he was a self-proclaimed anarchist punk, which just meant that he knew more and knew better than everyone. He used to tell me that he knew me better than everyone else, but really that could not have been true because I hardly ever talked about myself and he was never satisfied with who I was.” **“Please Stay”** “I wrote it in September of 2019, after we recorded most of the record. I had been circling around this role that I have played throughout my life, where I am trying to convince somebody that I love very much that their life is worth living. The song is about me just feeling helpless but trying to do anything I can to offer any sort of way in to life, instead of a way out. One day at a time is the right pace to aim for.” **“Triple Dog Dare”** “In high school I was friends with this girl and we would spend all our time together. Neither of us were out, but I think that her mom saw that there was romantic potential, even though I wouldn\'t come out to myself for many years later. The first verses of the song are true: Her mom kept us apart, our friendship didn\'t last. But the ending of the song is this fictitious alternative where the characters actually do prioritize each other and get out from under the thumbs of their parents and they steal a boat and they run away and it\'s sort of left to anyone\'s interpretation whether or not they succeed at that or if they die at sea. There’s no such thing as nonfiction. I felt empowered by finding out that I could just do that, like no one was making me tell the truth in that scenario. Songwriting doesn\'t have to be reporting.”

Lil Nas X is nothing if not a testament to the power of being true to yourself. His breakthrough single, “Old Town Road,” forced the industry to revisit old conversations about the limitations of genre, race, and who is kept out (or locked in) by the definitions we use to talk about music. The Georgia-born singer-rapper responded in kind with a remix and remixes to that remix that rocketed him up the charts and simultaneously highlighted the fickleness of the entire endeavor—did Billy Ray Cyrus suddenly prove his country bona fides any more than the addition of Young Thug proved his trap ones or Diplo his electronic? But that\'s the magic of Lil Nas X and of his debut album *MONTERO*: He knows that pop music is whatever the artist creating it wants it to be, an exercise of vulnerable imagination packaged as unyielding, larger-than-life confidence. “I feel like with this album, I know what I wanted,” he tells Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe. “I know what I want. I know where I want to be in life. And I know that\'s going to take me being more open and bringing it out of myself no matter how much it hurts or feels uncomfortable to say things that I need to say.” But any such ambivalence doesn\'t explicitly manifest in the songs here, as Lil Nas X roams his interior spaces as openly as he does assorted styles—which span everything from emo and grunge to indie pop and pop punk. On “DEAD RIGHT NOW,” a thunderous track complete with choral flourishes, he recaps the journey to this moment, how it almost didn\'t happen, and the ways his personal relationships have changed since. “If I didn’t blow up, I would\'ve died tryna be here/If it didn’t go, suicide, wouldn’t be here,” he sings, adding, “Now they all come around like they been here/When you get this rich and famous everybody come up to you singing, \'Hallelujah, how’d you do it?\'” All throughout—on songs like “SUN GOES DOWN” or “DONT WANT IT”—the weight of his burdens exists in contrast to the levity of his sound, a particular kind of Black and queer disposition that insists on a joy that is far more profound than any pain. And make no mistake, there is plenty of joy here. On “SCOOP,” he finds an effervescent kindred spirit in Doja Cat, while “DOLLA SIGN SLIME,” which features Megan Thee Stallion, is a trapped-out victory lap. Elsewhere, the dark riffs on the outstanding “LIFE AFTER SALEM” bring him to new creative lands altogether. The album brims with surprises that continuously reveal him anew, offering a peek into the mind of an artist who is unafraid of himself or his impulses, even with the knowledge that he\'s still a work in progress. “Don\'t look at me as this perfect hero who\'s not going to make mistakes and should be the voice for everybody,” he says. “You\'re the voice for you.” And to that effect, *MONTERO* is a staggering triumph that suggests not just who Lil Nas X is but the infinite possibilities of who he may be in the future, whether that falls within the scope of our imaginations or not.

On her sixth LP, Dawn Richard wanted to celebrate the Black DJs and producers who played an instrumental role in developing the early sounds of electronic music. “Dance music has always been culturally from a Black culture,” Richard tells Apple Music. “It’s Detroit house, Chicago footwork, the New Jersey sound, D.C. go-go, and it goes on.” Dismayed by their lack of representation in festivals and playlists, most notably female artists, the New Orleans artist felt the need to speak louder through her art in order to break the glass ceiling. “I have always been a warrior, this Black woman fighting in a space where I didn\'t think I needed to fight,” she adds. “Conceptually, this album became bigger than just a sonic experience—it became an intention.” Also driven by a desire to bring her hometown to the fore, Richard wanted to tell the story of New Orleans filtered through a post-apocalyptic lens—an idea that started from some sketches she drew while working as a creative consultant for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. Centered around an android alter ego she created called King Creole, *Second Line* is a futurist, dance-driven voyage intended to narrate her evolution from girl-group reality star to independent artist. “I had to figure out how to stand on my own in a system that didn\'t look at me as belonging in the genre that I was trying to tackle,” she says. “The android was the mainstream journey. Then the independent hustle comes, and you get to see King Creole as the human.” Read on as Richard guides you on her journey through self-discovery. **“King Creole (Intro)”** “It is a call to arms saying, if you thought you knew what this genre or what this electronic idea was, I\'m going to show you what it really is. And I\'m going to add New Orleans all over it right out the gate. So you know it\'s going to drip with soul and presence, and electronic is not just going to be an algorithm—it\'s going to be a soulful experience.” **“Nostalgia”** “I wanted to make sure that I paid homage to those who created and started a genre that is usually not recognized. Larry Heard was one of those incredible DJs and producers that I actually loved. I wanted to say, ‘Let\'s go back to Black, because this genre was started and developed by a culture that is Black.\' I\'m also introducing the mechanics of King Creole and her build—the first half of the album is the machine version of King Creole. It\'s the android—so that\'s why the beats per minute is fast and why we\'re dealing with a more processed sound.” **“Boomerang”** “Now we\'re playing with the vocals as the instrumentation to bring us through. So out the gate, we\'re hearing the vocoder, the harmonization between the vocals. And again, paying homage to a sound that was curated by Blacks. So again, disco becomes the next one. We\'re still in the future, but we\'re paying homage to the root. And with \'Boomerang,\' there are all these messages saying that the love comes back. If you give love out, it\'ll come back tenfold. So it\'s the idea that within this space, each record pays homage to the things that came before.” **“Bussifame”** “The word itself comes from New Orleans. We talk fast so everything we do is bled together. So really, it generally was ‘bust it for me’—like ‘bust a move’—but in New Orleans that sounds like ‘Bussifame.’ I was paying respects to the accent. I wanted to try to take it to the next level, bring New Orleans to the future. We don\'t hear New Orleans in this kind of sound, and that was the fun part—to create something that doesn\'t exist yet.” **“Pressure”** “To me, ‘Pressure’ was taking a traditional pop record and completely de-structuring it—adding bits of Chicago footwork, adding bits of go-go, adding bits of drum and bass, like really playing with movement within the bass and the sound. The record constantly moves. By the end of it, it goes into hip-hop. I\'m just spitting at that point. Like the cockiness to say that, \'I\'m going to give you a record that has four different transitions, and you will never know what to expect.\'” **“Pilot (A Lude)”** “It\'s a bounce record. It\'s an ode to Freedia, Katey Red, and Messy Mya, and I got to show love to my city. If I\'m going to talk about dance, I got to show love to where I grew up in. And again, calling the record \'Pilot,\' saying that we are the flyers of this. We steer this. Call us the pilots, because we are the connoisseurs of this thing that we do.” **“Jacuzzi”** “I always love juxtapositions, like applying something as catchy and melodic to the raunchiest of records. I\'ve always felt like Black women have been severely disrespected within us owning our sexuality. And on every album, I\'ve always had one song that best speaks to that. I really wanted to connect the relationship of one\'s body when you think about the intertwining of android to human; what that physically looks like sexually to the body, and how machine can make sense to human skin.” **“FiveOhFour (A Lude)”** “504 is an area code in New Orleans. You fight very hard to have that 504. The 504 legitimizes you as you\'re legit New Orleans. I produced it myself, showing that I didn\'t need a collaborator for this. It is purposely gritty, it is purposely pitched low. You\'re starting to see the shift in where I\'m getting out of android and going into human. But more importantly, I\'m showing how culturally important New Orleans is as the narrator of this process.” **“Voodoo (Intermission)”** “This is all *Blade Runner* at this point, the soundtrack to a post-apocalyptic New Orleans. So King Creole comes out, and she’s telling everyone that she\'s on a mission to give you more. This is the human in her that wants that acceptance and love. She\'s having the vulnerability to say, \'All I want is your love. If you can just see me, I can give you all of this.\'” **“Mornin Streetlights”** “‘Mornin Streetlights’ starts with my mom speaking about how the only person she\'s ever loved is my father. They met when they were 15 and they\'ve been together ever since. I love music, and the reason why I\'ve been so tenacious at it is because I\'ve only known love like that. I\'ve only been taught to love the way my mom and dad have loved. That\'s what I grew up in, but it also makes sense as to the way I love my art. I love it with a tenacity that I can\'t give up.” **“Le Petit Morte (A Lude)”** “I wanted something that was honest. Even just start with the comment ‘This is the last time I\'m going to write a song about you.\' It\'s like going from talking about how I love this music to then saying, \'But I\'m tired of talking about my relationship with art and music.\' It is my purest and most honest moment and I\'m at my most vulnerable. And I freestyled that entire record. I did that as soon as I walked in. My dad played the piano on it and I just wailed. I didn\'t even know what was coming out.” **“Radio Free”** “You see the album now start to transition into hope, because I never sit in that dark place too long. So with ‘Le Petit Morte,’ it felt a little like death. It\'s acknowledging the death, whereas \'Radio Free\' is acknowledging the loss but understanding that you can play your freedom loud.” **“The Potter”** “‘The Potter’ is seeing the loss of worthiness but exposing it and saying, ‘Okay. But how do I see myself as worthy?’ It came to me when I was in church. What happens when you rust, rot, and you sit on the shelf? Will you be loved then? Who am I now? They let you go, and then how do you go on? How do you go on knowing you are this sculpted thing that once was so beautiful that is now worthless to those? And how do you find your worth within that place?” **“Perfect Storm”** “It’s literally being in a storm—having lost everything and being in Katrina and recognizing that we were homeless. It was beautiful the day before. It was hell the day it happened. And then, the next day, it was beautiful again, as if it didn\'t happen, and everything in its path was gone. My biggest theme and aim was to make the record as close to an actual storm as I possibly could—and that breath of fresh air that you feel when you realize that you\'ve lost everything and that you\'re still alive.” **“Voodoo (Outermission)”** “So now we\'re out of it, and now I\'m bringing you to what will be the next album in the trilogy. Because we\'re on album two after *new breed*. I\'m taking myself and removing it out of the art and the music industry, and now it is me as myself. And so I\'m trying to maneuver you guys out of that journey, and I\'m bringing you into what will be the next phase.” **“SELFish (Outro)”** “When people think of selfish, they think of it negatively, and I totally threw that out the window. I\'ve always loved to mess with interludes and make these hidden gems where people are like, \'Why wasn\'t this song longer?\' With this one, I thought it would be really cool to make an outro eight minutes. Black women, especially, we are punished for wanting more for ourselves. And I just want to encourage artists that it\'s okay to put yourself first in the process.”

A decade after Willow Smith taught us how to whip our hair back and forth, the genre-bending artist is still just getting started. Her sound has evolved from bubblegum pop hits to alt-R&B to, now, a full pop-punk album. However, her transition into the genre shouldn’t be surprising, since rock runs in her blood: Her first introduction to the medium was from being on the road with her mother Jada Pinkett Smith’s nu-metal band Wicked Wisdom in the early 2000s. Then the multi-hyphenate talent experimented with rock-adjacent sounds on tracks like “Human Leech” from her 2017 album *The 1st*, and more prominently on her 2020 album *THE ANXIETY*. All of these moments set the groundwork for the singer’s fifth studio album. Created and recorded during quarantine, *lately I feel EVERYTHING* is an homage to the touchstones of 2000s pop-punk, such as blink-182, Avril Lavigne, and Fefe Dobson. The opening track “t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l” is an upbeat, energetic, angst-ridden anthem with a mix of clean and distorted guitars backed by booming drums courtesy of blink-182’s drummer Travis Barker, who assists on two other tracks on the album. For every angsty pop-punk like “Gaslight” and “G R O W”—which features none other than Lavigne herself—there’s a heavier metal-influenced track like “Lipstick,” “don’t SAVE ME,” or “Come Home,” showing WILLOW’s growth not only as a singer but as a songwriter.

“I think that there is always reward in choosing to be the most vulnerable,” Kacey Musgraves tells Apple Music. “I have to remind myself that that\'s one of the strongest things you can do, is to be witness to being vulnerable. So I’m just trying to lean into that, and all the emotions that come with that. The whole point of it is human connection.” With 2018’s crossover breakthrough *Golden Hour*, Musgraves guided listeners through a Technicolor vision of falling in love, documenting the early stages of a romantic relationship and the blissed-out, dreamy feelings that often come with them. But the rose-colored glasses are off on *star-crossed*, which chronicles the eventual dissolution of that same relationship and the ensuing fallout. Presented as a tragedy in three acts, *star-crossed* moves through sadness, anger, and, eventually, hopeful redemption, with Musgraves and collaborators Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk broadening the already spacey soundscape of *Golden Hour* into something truly deserving of the descriptors “lush” and “cinematic.” (To boot, the album releases in tandem with an accompanying film.) Below, Musgraves shares insight into several of *star-crossed*’s key tracks. **“star-crossed”** \"\[Guided psychedelic trips\] are incredible. At the beginning of this year, I was like, \'I want the chance to transform my trauma into something else, and I want to give myself that opportunity, even if it\'s painful.\' And man, it was completely life-changing in so many ways, but it also triggered this whole big bang of not only the album title, but the song \'star-crossed,\' the concept, me looking into the structure of tragedies themselves as an art form throughout time. It brought me closer to myself, the living thread that moves through all living things, to my creativity, the muse.\" **“if this was a movie..”** \"I remember being in the house, things had just completely fallen apart in the relationship. And I remember thinking, \'Man, if this was a movie, it wouldn\'t be like this at all.\' Like, I\'d hear his car, he\'d be running up the stairs and grabbing my face and say we\'re being stupid and we\'d just go back to normal. And it\'s just not like that. I think I can be an idealist, like an optimist in relationships, but I also love logic. I do well with someone who can also recognize common sense and logic, and doesn\'t get, like, lost in like these lofty emotions.\" **“camera roll”** \"I thought I was fine. I was on an upswing of confidence. I\'m feeling good about these life changes, where I\'m at; I made the right decision and we\'re moving forward. And then, in a moment of, I don\'t know, I guess boredom and weakness, I found myself just way back in the camera roll, just one night alone in my bedroom. Now I\'m back in 2018, now I\'m in 2017. And what\'s crazy is that we never take pictures of the bad times. There\'s no documentation of the fight that you had where, I don\'t know, you just pushed it a little too far.\" **“hookup scene”** \"So it was actually on Thanksgiving Day, and I had been let down by someone who was going to come visit me. And it was kind of my first few steps into exploring being a single 30-something-year-old person, after a marriage and after a huge point in my career, more notoriety. It was a really naked place. We live in this hookup culture; I\'m for it. I\'m for whatever makes you feel happy, as long as it\'s safe, doesn\'t hurt other people, fine. But I\'ve just never experienced that, the dating app culture and all that. It was a little shocking. And it made me just think that we all have flaws.\" **“gracias a la vida”** \"It was written by Violeta Parra, and I just think it\'s kind of astounding that she wrote that song. It was on her last release, and then she committed suicide. And this was basically, in a sense, her suicide note to the world, saying, \'Thank you, life. You have given me so much. You\'ve given me the beautiful and the terrible, and that has made up my song.\' Then you have Mercedes Sosa, who rerecords the song. Rereleases it. It finds new life. And then here I am. I\'m this random Texan girl. I\'m in Nashville. I\'m out in outer space. I\'m on a mushroom trip. And this song finds me in that state and inspires me to record it. It keeps reaching through time and living on, and I wanted to apply that sonically to the song, too.\"