Let‘s start with that speech. In September 2022, as Taylor Swift accepted Songwriter-Artist of the Decade honors at the Nashville Songwriter Awards, the headline was that Swift had unveiled an admittedly “dorky” system she’d developed for organizing her own songs. Quill Pen, Fountain Pen, Glitter Gel Pen: three categories of lyrics, three imagined tools with which she wrote them, one pretty ingenious way to invite obsessive fans to lovingly obsess all the more. And yet, perhaps the real takeaway was the manner in which she spoke about her craft that night, some 20 years after writing her first song at the age of 12. “I love doing this thing we are fortunate enough to call a job,” she said to a room of her peers. “Writing songs is my life’s work and my hobby and my never-ending thrill. A song can defy logic or time. A good song transports you to your truest feelings and translates those feelings for you. A good song stays with you even when people or feelings don’t.” On *Midnights*, her tenth LP and fourth in as many years—*if* you don’t count the two she’s just rerecorded and buttressed with dozens of additional tracks—Swift sounds like she’s really enjoying her work, playing with language like kids do with gum, thrilling to the texture of every turn of phrase, the charge in every melody and satisfying rhyme. Alongside longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, she’s set out here to tell “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout \[her\] life,” as she phrased it in a message to Apple Music subscribers. It’s a concept that naturally calls for a nocturnal palette: slower tempos, hushed atmosphere, negative space like night sky. The sound is fully modern (synths you’d want to eat or sleep in, low end that sits comfortably on your chest), while the aesthetic (soft focus, wood paneling, tracklist on the cover) is decidedly mid-century, much like the *Mad Men*-inspired title of its brooding opener, “Lavender Haze”—a song about finding refuge in the glow of intimacy. “Talk your talk and go viral,” she sings, in reference to the maelstrom of outside interest in her six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn. “I just want this love spiral.” (A big shout to Antonoff for those spongy backup vocals, btw.) In large part, *Midnights* is a record of interiors, Swift letting us glimpse the chaos inside her head (“Anti-Hero,” wall-to-wall zingers) and the stillness of her relationship (“Sweet Nothing,” co-written by Alwyn under his William Bowery pseudonym). For “Snow on the Beach,” she teams up with Lana Del Rey—an artist whose instinct for mood and theatrical framing seems to have influenced Swift’s recent catalog—recalling the magic of an impossible night over a backdrop of pizzicato violin, sleigh bells, and dreamy Mellotron, like the earliest hours of Christmas morning. “I’ve never seen someone lit from within,” Swift sings. “Blurring out my periphery.” But then there’s “Bejeweled,” a late, *1989*-like highlight on which she announces to an unappreciative partner, a few seconds in: “And by the way, I’m going out tonight.” And then out Swift goes, striding through the center of the song like she would the room: “I can still make the whole place shimmer,” she sings, relishing that last word. “And when I meet the band, they ask, ‘Do you have a man?’/I could still say, ‘I don’t remember.’” There are traces of melancholy layered in (see: “sapphire tears on my face”), but the song feels like a triumph, the sort of unabashed, extroverted fun that would have probably seemed out of place in the lockdown indie of 2020’s *folklore* and *evermore*. But here, side by side with songs and scenes of such writerly indulgence, it’s right at home—more proof that the terms “singer-songwriter” and “universal pop star” aren’t mutually exclusive ideas. “What’s a girl gonna do?” Swift asks at its climax. “A diamond’s gotta shine.” This special expanded version of *Midnights* includes seven additional songs.
hi everyone. this is a very deeply personal album but i don't wanna say much about it this time. i'll just say i hope it finds a way into your hearts. thank you for everything we also recorded some visuals, check it out www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl6g0lJ5V7k it's so intuitive to look up to the sky to try to find meaning on such events as natural as life itself I can only see pieces of you on every space that i can touch, see, hear, feel, breathe I see the desire to be able to look into your eyes one more time but I remember I can see you again when I stare in a mirror on my reflection, we are daughters of the stars and the same sun still burns when I close my eyes meandthesunalwaysandforever
“*Kid Krow* was my introduction to the world—there’s a lot of teen angst,” Conan Gray tells Apple Music, contrasting his sophomore album to his 2020 debut LP. “*Superache* is a bit more self-aware. I’ve had time to think about life; it’s my early twenties.” Written largely in isolation, on his bed, on the floor of his living room, and with Olivia Rodrigo producer Dan Nigro, the YouTuber-turned-pop star’s second LP is a maturation full of nuanced explorations of desire (“People Watching”) and romantic platonic friendships (“Best Friend”). “The overarching theme of this album is lingering pain—this mourning period that almost feels good. You wallow in it, and you cry, and you write all these songs; you’re being really annoying about it all,” Gray laughs. “That’s what a *Superache* is—I wanted it to have a bit of humor as well.” Educated in Taylor Swift’s songwriting school of lyrical specificity, *Superache* is an album of cut-close-to-the-heart narratives (“Astronomy”), explosive pop rock (“Jigsaw”), Harry Styles-esque solo balladry (“Yours”), and ascending vocal melody (“Memories”). Ambitious and melodramatic, sure, but always rewarding. “I hope this album makes people feel less alone in their experiences. That’s why I started writing music: I was a lonely kid and didn’t feel like I could understand other people,” he says. “Being alive is a confounding thing and you’re allowed to have insane, mixed emotions all the time.” Below, Conan Gray walks Apple Music through his sophomore LP, track by track. **“Movies”** “I think the reason why I chose ‘Movies’ as the opener is because it’s a song about being in denial. For a lot of my early teens and a lot of my life, I spent so long, trying so hard, to fall in love in a way that was normal. I wanted the Hallmark movie. I wanted that stupid, fake, perfect love because that’s what I grew up seeing. I think, in the past few years, I’ve realized that’s not what I want anymore. I wanted to show people the process of discovering that over this album.” **“People Watching”** “‘People Watching’ was a really pivotal point in making *Superache*. The truth is, I wrote this album at a time where I just wasn’t in love. I had very few romantic interests. And I feel like my whole life, I’ve been an observer of life but not a participator. I’ve watched people. What does it feel like to fall in love? I write all these songs because I’m trying to understand.” **“Disaster”** “‘Disaster’ sounds a little different from the rest of the album. I wanted the song to sound like overthinking, where you’re racing through all these moments in your life with someone and trying to decipher whether or not they like you, and whether you should tell them that you have feelings for them. So, I wanted the song to be really fast and to have hard synths and drums and this really quick dialogue.” **“Best Friend”** “The song is about a bunch of different friends in my life. Since I’ve never been in a relationship romantically, I really see my friends as the most important aspect of my entire life. It felt like something that I had to say on the album or else it would’ve been an inaccurate depiction of what my life has been like the past few years.” **“Astronomy”** “The reason why I put ‘Astronomy’ after ‘Best Friend’ is because ‘Astronomy’ is about my best friend. My deepest fear in life is losing my best friends—my childhood best friend in particular. It’s irrational because I know her better than anyone else on earth and she knows me better than anyone else. In the bridge, I say, ‘Stop trying to keep us alive/You’re pointing at stars in the sky/That already died.’ When you look up at the night sky, you see all these stars, and most of them actually aren’t even there anymore. That’s that moment when you’re losing a friendship or a relationship, and you realize that the only things you have to say to them are things that you’ve done in the past. There’s nothing new and there’s nothing more.” **“Yours”** “Dan \[Nigro\] and I were sitting at the piano, and he started playing the melody. It got stuck in my head. I started singing, ‘Somebody you call when you are alone...’ At that point in my life, I was dealing with that annoying, lingering love for someone that I very much felt was the most important person in my life. They didn’t have the same feelings towards me. I wanted the chorus to be really simple and repeat itself, like, ‘Well, I’m not yours, and I want more, but that stuff’s not going to happen.’ I wanted it to be very kind of plain.” **”Jigsaw”** “‘Jigsaw’ was the one part of the album where I really needed to express how angry it makes me that when you love somebody, it doesn’t matter who they are, it’s so hard to please them sometimes. You feel pressure to please them or become what they want you to be. I ended up getting in this argument with someone and I remember being so mad—the kind of mad where you start crying and you feel really stupid because you’re angry, but you’re crying. It was originally just a sad little acoustic song. I played it for Dan \[Nigro\] and I was like, ‘I want to make this song so loud.’” **“Family Line”** “It’s about watching generations of hurt people pass their pain onto their kids, and then their kids pass them onto their kids. In my childhood, I felt like I was told that I was going to end up living this very specific life and that I wasn’t going to have a bright future because of my past. ‘Family Line’ is me saying, ‘Well, it doesn’t really matter. I can be whatever I want to be.’ I was so scared to put it out; that was the reason why I needed to put it out.” **“Summer Child”** “My generation is the type of generation that loves to just act like everything is perfectly fine. When we talk about pain, we are very sarcastic about it. We don’t really get into depth about it, and we laugh it off. We create these facades about who we are in order to make things a bit easier. ‘Summer Child’ is me acknowledging the fact that we all have a tendency to create versions of ourselves that we think are easier for people to digest. But oftentimes, it’s just something that we’ve made up in our heads and everyone is perfectly lovable the way that they are.\" **“Footnote”** “‘Footnote,’ selfishly, is my favorite song in the entire album. It scratches this itch that I’ve never heard scratched before, if that makes any sense. It’s not a song about the big dramatic heartbreak and the screaming and the slamming doors and crying. It’s not about that. It’s about the aftermath. When your ex ends up writing the story of their life, you’re just going to be a tiny little footnote at the bottom of a page. So much of love, of music is about the big and the loud. This song is about the quiet realization that you’re just going to have to take a step back and let them go.” **“Memories”** “‘Memories’ was the very last song that I wrote for *Superache*. I wanted to take this phrase that I’ve heard so many times in rom-coms, sitting on the curb like, ‘Oh, I hope that you’ll stay in my memories forever. I love you. Never leave me.’ I wanted to take that phrase and completely deconstruct it, like, ‘You know what? I actually do wish you would stay in my memories and not exist in my present. I don’t want you right now. Go.’” **“The Exit”** “I wanted to end the album with ‘The Exit’ because it sums up the album. It’s about realizing that everyone around you is moving on, but you’re still standing at the exit, wondering how everyone is doing it so easily and how they’re able to continue on with their lives after being heartbroken. It’s always been something that’s dumbfounded me. I’m a lingerer. I just stick around, write songs, and think.”
Simple Minds return with eighteenth studio album Direction of the Heart, set for release on 21st October 2022 and including lead single ‘Vision Thing’. Direction of the Heart is Simple Minds’ first album of new material since 2018’s outstanding UK Top 5 album Walk Between Worlds. Throughout its nine tracks, Direction of the Heart finds the band at their most confident, anthemic best on an inspired celebration of life, and which manages to perfectly encapsulate the essence of past and present Simple Minds, a band whose reascent over the past 10 years has seen them, once again, capture the magic and critical praise of their early days.
The pop icon reinvents her hits with an army of gifted guests.
When it came to writing his third album, George Ezra was ready to fall back on a fail-safe formula. His first two—2014’s *Wanted on Voyage* and 2018’s *Staying at Tamara’s*—were propelled by travel (across Europe and in Barcelona, respectively), and the people, places, and things Ezra witnessed along the way. A mammoth walk the length of the UK was lined up to help unlock album three, but when the pandemic hit in 2020, Ezra, like the rest of us, was forced to stay put. “I was living alone in a flat in London without a balcony,” he tells Apple Music. “I did five weeks in that flat and had an awful lot of conversations with myself. \[That time\] made me realize how much I\'d relied in the past on other people\'s stories. Because I\'m not pinching other people\'s stories, you\'re left with your own, and that\'s great. It’s cathartic.” *Gold Rush Kid*, of course, houses the uplifting anthems that Ezra has built his career on (“Anyone for You,” “Gold Rush Kid”), a side of his music he will always cherish. But beneath those songs’ breezy charm lies Ezra’s most personal and horizon-broadening music yet. Born of those bracing conversations with himself, these are tracks about loneliness and yearning for love (“Sweetest Human Being Alive”), mental health (“I Went Hunting,” about Ezra’s experiences of intrusive, repetitive thoughts), the unexpected contentment he found in lockdown (“The Sun Went Down”), and just how much he wants to do all of this anyway. “The truth is, you love it. You\'ve lived a life that you couldn\'t have predicted so far,” says Ezra. “I see it as a gold rush: Be the gold rush kid. ‘I\'m proud of this record,’ ‘it\'s a personal record’ is the least sincere thing you hear artists say all the time. But I think this is a moment in time for me. At this moment, it felt like the right thing to do.” Read on as the singer-songwriter walks us through each track on his touching third album, including the four exclusive songs on this Apple Music Edition in Spatial Audio. **“Anyone for You”** “Often, when I listen to someone else\'s album, I end up skipping track one once I\'ve listened to it once or twice, because it\'s like the artist is trying to introduce you to the album. ‘Anyone for You’ doesn\'t feel like that for me. It feels like it\'s just in. \[During the 2020 lockdown\], I was going through old journals and had pages of trying to figure out who Tiger Lily could be. A big part of the conversations I was having with myself was about how, from whatever age, promoting yourself felt very locked in. ‘This is who you are.’ It didn\'t take much to say, ‘Well, that\'s not true. There\'s a lot of you.’ That\'s true of all of us. Naturally, once we started writing it, it was always going to be a positive song. We’d invite people into the studio and with this song and you could just see their faces loosening up. It still does that for me.” **“Green Green Grass”** “I was in the Caribbean in 2017-18 with two friends I grew up with. We were in this tiny bar and this really loud music came up, you could tell it was far away. I excused myself and ran down these little streets. There were different sound systems, a lot of hugging, dancing, food. I went into a shop and asked what the party was for. They said it was a funeral day and that they were celebrating three lives they had lost in their community. For me it was like, ‘That\'s amazing. Whoever those people were, if they could see this, I bet they\'d be so happy.’ I had the lyric from that point.” **“Gold Rush Kid”** “I was bumping into the idea of a gold rush a lot. There was one travel documentary I\'d watched about these guys who panned for gold in India. They were finding the dregs that had been washed up from bigger operations, and I remember one of the lads being like, ‘This is our gold rush.’ I was also talking to \[the album’s producer and Ezra\'s longtime collaborator\] Joel Pott an awful lot about how I didn\'t see myself doing this forever. But then anytime I speak about that, or anytime I\'ve spoken about that, I quite quickly come back around going, ‘But it\'s the best thing.’ It’s really fulfilling to write about \[some of the more personal aspects of this song\] in a creative way. It’s really obvious what certain lyrics are about.” **“Manila”** “The first three songs—although they’re independent of each other—are the same pace in the record. You kind of don’t take a breath until here. I love this song, and I fought tooth and nail for the guitar solo in it. I was listening to a lot of Khruangbin—this world, not just of rhythm, but of guitar tones, and I pushed for that. I love where we landed.” **“Fell in Love at the End of the World”** “This song was written well before the pandemic, back in 2016. We all thought 2016 was a fucked-up year, with Trump, Brexit, and it felt like every three weeks, another legend passed away. When we first recorded this, it was the one song that I can put my hands up and say, ‘We got that wrong.’ It sounded like a really rocky, Raconteurs-type song. Then we took it to the other extreme and dialed it back. It feels like this segue into the next part of the record.” **“Don’t Give Up”** “I just love the production on this. There’s a guitar part I had that I was playing in sound checks a lot whilst recording the last record, and I knew I wanted to do something with it. There were these nights that I couldn’t sleep, and I\'d often play guitar and just see if there were any ideas. There’s a lyric about it in this song \[\'I don’t sleep too good and I work too hard\'\]. It’s also the first of a few songs that came from that lockdown and longing and missing friends, missing family, and trying to figure out who you are amongst all those things.” **“Dance All Over Me”** “We wrote this song that was so Eurobeat-sounding, even with my delivery of the opening lyric. We would laugh about it: It was also disco-y, with bits that almost sounded like a Dua Lipa track. We kept coming back to it, scratching our heads, like, ‘Can we make it work?’ We were in the studio on a day where we had more or less finished all the songs, and I picked up Joel’s guitar, this old battered thing. You have to cite the Mark Ronson and Miley Cyrus track ‘Nothing Breaks Like a Heart.’ This song feels like new territory for me. It’s a really good feeling to stand next to it and say, ‘Yeah, it does sound like a curveball in a way, but it sounds like you.’” **“I Went Hunting”** “The name of this song is the idea that if you go looking for a problem, you\'re going to find one. If you want to find a reason that it\'s been a bad day, you’ll find it. But then, on the flip side, I could sense that something wasn\'t right, and I owed it to myself to turn the room inside out and try and find out what it was. One part in the second verse is ‘Imagine having a thought and then thinking it again, thinking it again, thinking it again.’ But some people have thought I said, ‘Imagine having a daughter.’ I’m genuinely gutted because I thought it was such a clear record and now I’m like, ‘You’ve fucked it.’ The lyric is about starting to understand a bit more about how your mind works and then realizing that maybe not everyone thinks in the same way. Because I think as a kid, I just assumed everyone did.’” **“In the Morning”** “This was written, more or less, on the same day as ‘I Went Hunting.’ It feels like they’re siblings. I was listening to a lot of records that were male voices using falsetto, and certainly in the first record, I wasn\'t confident enough to do it. And then you think, ‘You’re actually quite good at this. You should try it.’” **“Sweetest Human Being Alive”** “I think this is my favorite song on the record. I wrote it in the first lockdown. I was obviously very isolated. There was this moment where I was just walking through the flat with a guitar, playing a chord sequence I’ve had for a long time. I just thought, ‘Just fucking sing the truth.’ And it was: I\'m looking forward to meeting someone. I remember getting really emotional, because it was really hopeful, but really quite lonely. \[Once we recorded it\] I thought, ‘Oh no, you’ve written a piano ballad.’ But I love it.” **“Love Somebody Else”** “I wrote this at the end of the last record, when I was the least happy and getting to the point where you think, ‘Whatever’s going on in your head, it isn’t fucking working. So go pin the energy you are putting on fixating over this on someone else.’ Which I appreciate isn’t healthy, but for a pop song, it’s OK. This song had a blank space for the longest time. The second verse is almost like a stream of consciousness, but it\'s my favorite verse I\'ve ever written.” **“The Sun Went Down”** “During that first lockdown, there were also these really beautiful days where I was making myself do things such as no screens for 48 hours or no talking for 24 hours. I pulled this chair into the window because there was a bit of a heat wave going on, but I couldn\'t get outside, so I just sat there. I wasn’t speaking. I was reading. And there were all these feelings \[in the previous songs\], but there was also, just as clearly, this real contentment.” **Apple Music Edition tracks** “It was proposed to me that we reimagine some of the songs. I said, ‘Can we see what they would sound like if we give \[the album’s string arranger\] Tobie Tripp the stems: strip them back, replace things, let Tobie remix things that are in there?’ That, to me, felt like a sincere way of reimagining them. I think it\'s also a really good lesson in production of how many different ways something can sound. I genuinely didn\'t want to just do the singles. It felt like if you were given this space, do the ones that lend itself to this idea. Don\'t try and string up ‘Anyone for You.’ Tobie indulged in more creative license than I was anticipating, but it’s a beautiful thing now to have. Alongside everything else, there’s a huge ladle’s worth of impostor syndrome. There is still this sentiment of, ‘God, do people want to hear my music? Is this any good? Do these people want to work with me?’ And so it\'s not lost on me that these people do. I don’t jump for joy when I’m asking to do a cover, which will be born of insecurity and a lack of confidence. But a friend of mine who was once working with Jamie T said, ‘What do you think Jamie’s best song was?’ And I said, ‘Love Is Only a Heartbeat Away.’ I love his *Carry on the Grudge* record, and \[the cover\] sounds great.”
ITZY, the JYP Entertainment K-pop girl group (Yeji, Lia, Ryujin, Chaeryeong, and Yuna), is no stranger to reinvention. And like the overwhelming majority of their releases, ITZY’s sixth EP demonstrates their range. There’s the opener and title track “CHESHIRE” and its light-industrial production with a Joker-fied lyrical refrain of “Why so serious?” and the haunted jewelry-box sounds of “Snowy.” The EP’s most charming harmony comes in “Freaky,” a cheer of “I’m in my zone/Just leave me alone” above a trap beat. The closer, the fully English “Boys Like You,” starts like a 2010s Kesha hit and moves into something decidedly more PG: sassy teen pop, like a Katy Perry B-side—an elated diss of male mediocrity. It’s an earworm.
The K-pop crew serve up complex emotions in a stylish genre mix.
NB. 3LP and 2CD editions contain 21 tracks, not all tracks listed here due to digital licensing restrictions. Simple Headphone Mind’ b/w ‘Trippin’ With The Birds’ was the second collaboration between Nurse With Wound and Stereolab. A 12” disk released on yellow vinyl [1000 copies] and black vinyl [4996 copies] The sleeve was made from a 'Mylar style’, aluminium coloured, material that was glued and sealed – each purchaser had to open the sleeve to discover which colour vinyl they had bought. The CDs were also released in a sealed sleeve. Originally released 28th April 1997 via Duophonic Super 45s. Catalogue numbers DS33-11 / DS45CD-11. The ‘Low Fi’ EP - ‘Low Fi’, ‘[Varoom!]’, ‘Laisser-Faire’ and ‘Elektro [he held the world in his iron grip]’ was originally released as a limited edition clear vinyl 10” [approx 500 copies], black vinyl 10” and CD. Released 28th September 1992 by Too Pure. Catalogue numbers Pure 14 / Pure CD14. ‘Robot Riot’ and ‘Unity Purity Occasional’ were both written for sculptures made by Charles Long - an artist that we had previously collaborated with on the ‘Music For The Amorphous Body Study Center’ project. ‘Unity Purity Occasional’ was used in 2000 for Charles' sculpture of the same name - "Unity Purity Occasional is a sculpture with six hand-blown, tear-shaped glass cups filled with antibacterial hand gel that the visitor can pump out and disinfect their hands with. The song is channeled through three tubes that simultaneously blow the visitors’ hands dry with warm jets of air." [Text by Niki Kralli Anell]. ‘Robot Riot’ is previously unreleased. ‘Spool of Collusion’ and ‘Forensic Itch’ were originally released on August 18th 2008 as a black vinyl 7” that was given away with the initial pressing [5000 copies] of the ‘Chemical Chords’ LP. Released via Duophonic UHF Disks / 4AD. Catalogue number AD2820. ‘Spool of Collusion’ was also added, as a bonus track, to the Japanese CD release of ‘Chemical Chords’. ‘Symbolic Logic Of Now!’ was one side of a split 7” with Soi-Disant. 100 copies on blue vinyl and 2000 copies on black vinyl. Originally released in 1998 by Luke Warm Music. Catalogue number LWM001. ‘Ronco Symphony’ [Demo] – a demo version of the track from 1993’s 'The Groop Played "Space Age Batchelor Pad Music"’ album. Previously unreleased. A cover of the track ‘ABC’ by The Multitude from The Godz album ‘The Third Testament’. The track was originally recorded for a Godz tribute album called ‘Godz Is Not A Put On’ and released in an edition of 500 copies by Lissy’s Records in 1996. The track was later released as one side of a yellow glitter 7” that was part of an exclusive Japanese box set edition of ‘Aluminum Tunes [Switched On Volume 3]’. Yellow glitter 7” – approximately 3000 copies. Catalogue number D-UHF-D21. ‘Magne-Music’ and ‘The Nth Degrees’ were added as bonus tracks to the UK limited edition CD of ‘Chemical Chords’ released 18th August 2008 via Duophonic UHF Disks / 4AD. Catalogue number CADD2815CD. Both tracks also appear on the Japanese edition of ‘Chemical Chords’. ‘Blaue Milch’ was recorded for a Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra compilation album – each artist on the album was sent a Peter Thomas audio track and was asked to build it into a new track. Originally released in 1998 by the Bungalow record label. Catalogue number Bung 048.2. The original recording of ‘Plastic Mile’. The re-recording was released as a 7” b/w ‘I Was A Sunny Rainphase’ and subsequently compiled onto Stereolab’s ‘Fab Four Suture’ album. Previously unreleased. ‘Yes Sir! I Can Moogie’ was originally released in 1995 as part of a single sided 3 track 7” flexi-disk via Wurlitzer Jukebox. Catalogue number WJ03 - 1000 copies were pressed. ‘Refractions In The Plastic Pulse’, a track from the ‘Dots And Loops’ album remixed by Autechre. A 12” disk released on 20th April 1998 via Duophonic UHF Disks. Catalogue number D-UHF-D19. 500 copies pressed on translucent yellow vinyl and 2972 copies on black vinyl. ‘XXXOOO’ was originally released in 1992 as part of a single sided 3 track 7” flexi-disk via the Encore! label. The flexi-disk was given away with edition #6 of the 'Tea Time' fanzine. Catalogue number Encore 001. A live version of the ‘Emperor Tomato Ketchup’ album track ‘Cybele's Reverie’. Recorded 26th September 2004 when Stereolab supported Air at The Hollywood Bowl, CA. USA. Previously unreleased.
On the cover of Rachel Chinouriri’s second EP, the South London singer-songwriter stands triumphant in front of a bright blue sky. And yet, next to her, the EP’s title, *Better Off Without*, hints at something less sunny that lies beneath the surface. It’s a neat summation of what you can expect from this EP’s four tracks. These are bright and often breezy indie-pop songs, but they also reveal the story arc of a painful breakup. “I find it hard to write about happy things, but I still sometimes like happy-sounding music,” Chinouriri tells Apple Music. “I think that’s where the juxtaposition of my music comes in. The instrumentals don’t give it away, but the lyrics definitely give away what I’m feeling.” The EP is a gear shift from 2021’s *Four° in Winter*, a darker, more insular and experimental body of work. But returning to the lighter sound of her earlier music has brought Chinouriri—a 2021 nominee for The Ivors Rising Star Award with Apple Music—closer to where she wants to be. “When I first started releasing music, I was very indie,” she says. \"But it was strange: I kept being called hip-hop and soul and stuff, and it was really confusing. I tried to maybe accommodate myself a bit more. I loved so many elements of *Four° in Winter*, and I think it definitely represents how I was feeling at the time. I was in a dark place and feeling a bit undermined. But now I’m in a place where I’m happier. I’m free, I’m myself, and I’m flourishing the most.” Read on as Chinouriri dives deeper into the stories and sounds behind each song on her special EP. **“All I Ever Asked”** “At the time I wrote this song, I was in a relationship that I didn’t feel like I was getting my full fulfillment from. I felt like I was always asking for very simple and small things, and they would just never, ever happen. But also, when you’re in a relationship, you don’t really want to throw your partner under the bus, so I think I had a lot of self-denial. My best friend called me, and she had just gone through a breakup. Everything I was feeling deep down, I managed to translate through her. I love dancing to \[this song\] onstage. I had a lot of dark-sounding songs at that moment, so I was like, ‘OK, let’s make this one a little bit happier-sounding, despite the lyric.’” **“Happy Ending”** “This song is kind of me conflicting with myself about an apology for my ex. To him, I’ve broken his heart and I’ve ended something which was happy for him. But to me, he ended it because I couldn’t continue with how he was. I felt like I was robbed of the happy ending. When I was four or five, my mum used to play a lot of tribal music or African a cappella music, and harmony is one thing which I really feel deeply inside of me. And when I was writing ‘Happy Ending,’ I wanted to make harmonies underneath the chorus to heighten the feeling that I was having. Your heart really breaks even though the instrumental sounds quite cheery, in a way.” **“Better Off Without”** “As much as I love happy-sounding songs, I always say in the studio, ‘Too much joy is not good.’ When I was making this song, it was kind of the point in the breakup where I started feeling resentment, the point where it’s like, ‘How could you do this to me?’ It was like, ‘I care too much for you. You don’t care for me. And I guess we’ll just be better off without each other.’ That was the message I was trying to convey.” **“Fall Right Out of Love”** “It started as an acoustic song, and it was definitely a reflection of the entire relationship. It was a bumpy ride, and it’s a very hard one to sing. Even when I do it live, it’s painful. In ‘Fall Right Out of Love,’ I was confused, not with my sound, but with the love and the situation. I reflected that in the production. A way for me to express how I feel is definitely musical and writing lyrics. Just condensing stuff into a song really helps.”
“Growing up is chaotic,” Tate McRae sings on her debut album—and that’s especially true when you’ve logged a Top 10 single in multiple countries and racked up over a billion streams before you’ve graduated from high school. After her devastating 2020 ballad “you broke me first” transformed the former aspiring dancer into Billie Eilish’s honorary Canadian cousin, McRae spends much of her debut album offering us reassurances that success hasn’t changed her—in that she still feels as confused, anxious, and messed up as any other 18-year-old. That sense of turmoil is baked right into the album title: *i used to think i could fly*, a phrase that, for McRae, signifies the loss of innocence and idealism that occurs on the journey to adulthood. “When you\'re younger, everything seems completely possible,” McRae tells Apple Music. “You wouldn\'t assume that heights are scary, because no one\'s told you what they\'re scared of. No one\'s left a mark on you yet. I’ve always been interested with the idea of how life makes a mark on you as you get older, and how the people you surround yourself with shape you as a person.” In McRae’s case, those transformative and traumatic moments often play out in the context of toxic relationships plagued by substance abuse, infidelity, and gaslighting. The singer has a forensic eye for those subtle turning-point moments in a partnership—like a boyfriend forgetting to wish her good night for the first time—that spell inevitable doom. But while *i used to think i could fly* is built upon McRae’s familiar foundation of aching acoustic melodies and atmospheric trap-infused R&B production, the album also uncorks a pop-punk energy that breaks up the pity party. “I didn\'t want this album to feel like a sulk-for-me album,” McRae says. “I wanted people to have moments where they could cry and feel like they could relate, but I also want them to feel like \'I\'m a bad bitch\' at the same time. I just wanted to cross off all aspects of my brain.” Here, McRae talks us through her mental checklist, track by track. **“?”** “I basically pick up my phone and record everything. I was on a plane, and I was scrolling through all of my voice memos because I was super bored, and I found this one clip. I cut it up and put a whole bunch of effects on it. And I thought, ‘This could be a really cool way to start off the album.’ I used to hear Juice WRLD do this kind of stuff a lot, and I was really inspired by that. I wanted to give people some sort of context of what the album title meant to me.” **“don’t come back”** “A lot of my songs on this album are super self-analytical and self-deprecating at times—they\'re some of the more intense songs that I\'ve ever written. But I wanted the album to start with something lighter, and something that felt kind of empowering. It’s an interpolation of a Nelly song \[‘Ride Wit Me’\], which is super cool—I’ve never done something like that.” **“i’m so gone”** “‘don\'t come back’ feels like more of a vague opener, but ‘i\'m so gone’ definitely talks about a real situation. I\'m the type of person who, when I\'m moving on \[from a relationship\], I\'ll be like, \'I\'m gonna stick my head up and keep trudging on with my life and I\'m not gonna let you ruin the things that I\'ve been doing recently.\' I wanted \[the two songs\] to be on the same kind of line, but you can tell this song touches on a more vulnerable side and gets a little more sensitive compared to \'don\'t look back\'—I thought that was a cool dynamic.” **“what would you do?”** “I had no idea what this song was gonna be like when I was writing it. I wrote it with Charlie Puth and Alexander 23, and it was a really interesting situation, because I had no idea what Charlie was creating on his million different instruments that he was playing. I just started writing about these real feelings, and then, by the end, we were all like, \'What the hell did we just write?\' This is such a crazy song. Writing with a tempo change was so foreign to me. It felt like a big risk for me to take as an artist.” **“chaotic”** “I was at Greg Kurstin\'s studio. I had been writing with a lot of people and I wasn\'t getting songs that I really connected with. And I think it was because there was a lot changing in my life—I had graduated high school and turned 18 and moved to LA and I was kind of settling into my own skin for the first time. I had no idea who I was. And I feel like this was one of the first times that I sat down in a session and I was like, \'Okay, I need to really talk about where my mental state is at right now, because I don\'t know if it\'s looking too good.\' I didn\'t even think I would end up releasing this song, because it was so personal to me. I was really nervous to put it out. I wrote it really quietly on my computer, and then an hour later, I walked across the studio and gave Greg a high five and left.” **“hate myself”** “I feel like in \[failed\] relationships, the first thing people will do is make themselves a victim, because the easiest way to heal from things is to blame something on the other person. And I feel like I\'m really opposite in that sense—a lot of the time, I\'ll take the blame for everything, and I\'ll overanalyze everything that I did wrong to wreck something. There\'s that line ‘After I just put you right through hell/You couldn\'t hate me more than I hate myself’—I think that was a really cool way to approach this situation. I had just recently gone through a fresh breakup the day I wrote this. You can hear my voice cracking because I was actually crying while recording it. I take the blame throughout the song, and I feel like I make myself the villain in the story. But then you get to the bridge, and there\'s this point where it\'s like, \'I know that you\'re gonna be happier with another person, and that\'s the most painful thing in the world for me.\' That\'s what makes the song so heartbreaking.” **“what’s your problem?”** “I think this record is such a great description of me as a person, because I feel like I have so many different sides to my personality, and they can switch at any second. It\'s crazy, because I wrote \'hate myself,\' and then a couple months later, I came to the realization where I was like, ‘Oh, so this is why I was blaming myself—because he made me hate myself!’ So when I was writing this song, I put in the line ‘You made me hate myself just so that I can love you more.’ It was really cool to just talk about the perspective of a manipulator and how that can really mess you up mentally.” **“she’s all i wanna be”** “This one actually started out as a ballad. I was writing with Greg Kurstin—again, I was sitting in the corner of the room with my computer, and he was playing these really depressing piano chords. I had been scrolling through social media all day, and I was going through the worst feelings of comparison—I just remember thinking to myself, ‘Right now, I would rather be anyone else in the world.’ It was just a moment of feeling those really toxic feelings of envy and insecurity and jealousy. I wrote this song in like an hour—and then four days later, I emailed Greg, and I was like, ‘Hey, is there any way you could turn this into an upbeat, poppier song?’ He came back with this kick-ass guitar part and totally made it into this really cool punk song. It totally shifted the energy and brought a whole new life to it.” **“boy x”** “It was my first time writing with Alex. And I just had this one line in my notes: ‘But when you get bored, like you always do/Just tell me that you\'ll let her go before you look for someone new.’ I wanted to write a song about wandering eyes—when a person\'s eyes start to wander before they actually end the relationship. Alex and I were sitting in this garden, and he was just strumming on his guitar, and I started describing this girl and we started writing this whole story around this line that I had wrote. And then by the end, we slowly realized that this whole time that I was improvising and writing, I was reallly talking about myself.” **“you’re so cool”** “This song talks about a lot of different people—so don\'t worry, I\'m not just ripping on this one individual! I had never really experienced how awful it is to be around people with huge egos. Because I\'m from Calgary, Alberta, I feel very grounded—I sometimes joke that I have a negative ego. In this song, I really wanted to just talk about how it\'s so wild that you can look at yourself in the mirror and just be so obsessed with yourself and think you are just the shit and want to treat everyone else around you like they are the worst things to exist. I was kind of shocked to meet people like that.” **“feel like shit”** “I hadn\'t actually gone through my first-ever real heartbreak until this summer. I always knew how to write about small things and blow them up. But once I actually went through a big thing, I had no idea how to write about it. And it took me forever to actually process what was going on, until I went to the studio one day and said, \'I genuinely feel like shit.\' So I wrote this song about it.” **“go away”** “It\'s a really crazy thing how you can get so caught up on one person that no matter how great your life is, this person will still be the only thing on your mind. I was going through some experiences that I always dreamed of—moments that I should have been super present for, where I should have been happy and feeling on top of the world. It\'s so wild to me that if one person is stuck on your mind, it can take up all of your thoughts and distract you from anything good going on. This song was a cool way for me to sum up the album: I should be enjoying everything right now, and I should feel like my life is going great, and I don\'t because of you—because you\'re the only thing I can think of.” **“i still say goodnight”** “Obviously, FINNEAS has been a big inspiration of mine for quite some time, and getting to work with him on this song was an honor. He started off playing these beautiful, classic piano chords that, to me, felt like the rolling credits in an old movie. I\'m a very visual person—I feel like I can watch a movie in my head when I sing. What I see is what I write, and so in this situation, I was envisioning this one thing that I remembered from a specific person: Whenever they would lie to me, they would always twitch their eye a certain way. I specifically remembered that look that they would give me. Trying to have hope in something but just knowing it\'s all a lie is a really crazy feeling. And at the end, I feel so stupid because I still think saying good night to each other is just the last bit of hope in a relationship. It\'s sometimes the last thing that people hold on to before you cut ties.”
Lauv (aka Ari Staprans Leff) has made a name for himself through his unique approach to hyper-contemporary breakup pop—2017’s “I Like Me Better” became an unavoidable finger-click beat, leading to his debut LP in 2020, the memoir-ish *How I’m Feeling*. Now, one pandemic later, he’s choosing to center his work on a theme of inner childhood. His sophomore LP, *All 4 Nothing*, is an attempt to distinguish Leff from Lauv, his autonomy from his profession, his adult self from what he thought his adult self would be like. “It’s realizing growing up is not what I thought it was,” he tells Apple Music. “Life is not going to look the way I think it is, and even when it does, it doesn\'t make me happy. When was I happiest? As a kid.” At its heart, however, is a pop album with an inherent lightness and darkness, meditation and chemical highs. “Growing up is all for nothing if you’re not connected to yourself on the inside,” he says. “More so than the specificity of the situations, I hope that \[listeners\] can connect to the emotion of striving to find lightness again, to find your true self again, when you feel disconnected from it.” Below, Lauv walks us through *All 4 Nothing*, track by track. **“26”** “I was in the studio, partying a bit, and found all of these lyrics pouring out of me. I felt weird shame. It summed up something I had felt for a long time, which was, ‘Why can’t I be happy with all of the amazing things that have come into my life? Why am I sitting here, significantly more unhappy after success, and what do I have to do about that?’ I decided I wanted to kick it off with some energy.” **“Stranger”** “‘Stranger’ is a song about the saga of being an anxious person and trying to fall in love. It’s also about recognizing how many times relationships have fallen apart and being scared to get close to somebody and knowing that you push people away a lot. There’s a lot of chaos around it. Every song is just straight up about my life. I wrote this while I was in one particular relationship, but the song is really just about dating in my twenties, always falling apart.” **“Kids Are Born Stars”** “I discovered inner-child meditation and that led to this song. I was at a therapy retreat in the middle of nowhere Arizona, guided through meditation. You visualize yourself at a younger age. And for me, different ages were coming up—eight-year-old me, 12-year-old me, 14-year-old me going on these little journeys to reconnect with memories from those times or things that felt significant or things you forgot about. ‘Kids Are Born Stars’ is very much the song version of that—of me going back to my eighth-grade self and being like, ‘You’ve got this.’” **“Molly in Mexico”** “That’s the dichotomy of the light and darkness of the album: It’s striving for the same feeling, one from a healthy and grounded and loving and kind place, and one is from shortcuts, chasing the highs in the moment to just feel free and to feel explosive and to feel like a little kid again.” **“All 4 Nothing (I’m So in Love)”** “I wrote this with my girlfriend \[Sophie Cates\] at the time—a really beautiful experience. A huge part of this album is the healing that you go through in love with somebody; that’s such an avenue to finding your true self and finding that childhood energy again. That’s something I hadn’t felt in so long: just being able to really surrender. This feels so good right now, and if this falls apart, all of the work we’ve put in would’ve been for nothing. It’s an aspiration \[to get beyond that\].” **“Stay Together”** “‘Stay Together’ is super poignant for me. It’s reflecting on younger love, when I didn’t really know what love was, and I had all these big plans.\" **“Summer Nights”** “I was listening to so much dance-y stuff, even \[Dua Lipa’s\] *Future Nostalgia*. Me and a couple of my friends started having our own mini dance parties, and I was like, ‘I’ve got to make something.’ And Jakob \[Rabitsch\], one of the producers, played me the beat one day. He’s like, ‘I made this beat with Guy \[Lawrence\] from Disclosure.’ The whole chorus happened instantly. I just find the chords so fascinating; they sound like some classical piano in the beginning. It’s super non-traditional.” **“Time After Time”** “That song is half about my relationship with substances, but also the idea of a toxic relationship—why you’re so drawn to it, and why it’s so appealing. But it can destroy you, and sometimes, you still do it over and over again.” **“Hey Ari”** “Right after I finished ‘Hey Ari’ and heard it in the studio for the first time, I was bawling on the floor. I may or may not have been on mushrooms, but I was crying. We have some bangers happening, and then it’s the wake-up moment. You go through those bouts of time in life where you’re just trying to figure it out and trying to get to a good place. And you have those moments where you’re like, ‘I need to check out my life right now because I’m not happy, and no more excuses.’ Everybody should be happy. That song very much felt like a sobering check-in with me.” **“Better Than This”** “People are always shocked that my mind naturally goes to a place of struggle, even with upbeat vibes. I don’t know: It’s hard to make something that feels all positive to me. So, musically, it can feel uplifting, but then the lyrics, I naturally won’t go there.” **“Bad Trip”** “It’s my personal favorite. John Cunningham, the producer, I’m pretty sure he had the whole instrumental already made. He played it for me, and I fell madly in love with it. It’s basically about a bad trip where you feel really disconnected. To me, it gives me a bit of the energy of \[Rihanna’s\] ‘We Found Love.’” **“I (Don’t) Have a Problem”** “That song is about using things as a substitute for confidence, a false sense of confidence. It’s a little memoir on that. For me, it is particularly about Adderall. I have narcolepsy, so I’m really tired all the time. When I was in college, I got prescribed stimulants, like Ritalin, to help me stay awake. Being a person who is obsessed with productivity, you could see how that would not go the best direction.” **“First Grade”** “‘First Grade’ is the light at the end of the tunnel. You just went through a vortex. And then it’s like, get back to reality, get back to the good. ‘First Grade’ is about falling in love with somebody, seeing them for who they are, watching them struggle to express themselves fully, and relating to that. Everyone wants to be famous today, and that’s something that really fucked with my head for a long time. In writing this album, I concluded that, no, everybody is a star in their own right. Some people lose touch with part of themselves, or they’re never really given a chance to nurture that part of themselves. It’s a nice thematic closer for me.”