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Liner Notes (January 29th, 2022)

Posted by Jason Tate

This week’s newsletter has early first impressions of the new Dashboard Confessional, thoughts on other music I enjoyed this week, and commentary on other entertainment I consumed over the past week. Plus, a playlist of ten songs I loved this week. This week’s supporter Q&A post can be found here.

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A Few Things

  • I hope everyone had a good week. The We Are All Old festival sold out another date, which continues just to make me laugh now. I got my haircut this week, and my hairstylist said she was going to an EDM festival in Vegas later this summer and that there would be over 500k people there. I asked her if viral conspiracy TikTok videos were claiming it was fake. She didn’t get my joke. I don’t mean to be too coy in other tour news, but I heard about a tour being billed as a “reunion tour” for later this year that has me very excited. So, fingers crossed on that little birdie.

Sponsor

Inertia Diverse (formerly Collider) have shared their cover of Olivia Rodrigo’s “Jealousy, Jealousy.” They are also heading back into the studio to record new music for release later this year. Check out the song YouTube and Spotify.

In Case You Missed It

Music Thoughts

  • Dashboard Confessional released the new song “Burning Heart” this week, and it combines well with “Here’s To Moving On” in giving a nice little sneak peek at what this album is all about. I’ve had the pleasure of overplaying the hell out of it all week, and to me, it almost feels like a modern interpretation of his first two albums. It has all the emotional and cathartic elements we know and love, but it’s wrapped in the stories of a man in his mid-forties. If his first few albums were walking us through heartbreak and young adulthood, these are the songs of coming to terms with and trying to figure out this next stage of life. Of marriage, family, and children, and where does one fit in after they’ve grown up? The songs vary from primarily acoustic to some full-band tracks, and I find it an incredibly refreshing return to form after being let down by the last album. From the Alter the Ending echos in “The Better of Me” to the song that is going to absolutely wreck every emo parent, “Me and Mine,” to the begging to be sung along with “Southbound and Sinking,” this is Dashboard at his best. In college (deep breath ’cause I’m about to age myself), I used to listen to The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most on repeat in my Discman while laying on my bottom bunk. I’d stare at the wood paneling and get lost between the songs and my thoughts. It was the perfect album to become enveloped in and the kind of songs that made you think about picking up a guitar and singing your heart out. I spent the other night laying on the couch, staring at the ceiling, with this album coming through my headphones. Some twenty years later, much has changed, but some of my favorite things have stayed just the same. And that moment in the dark, a Dashboard album making me contemplate life and my place within it, is one of those great moments where memory and the present collapse upon each other like a twisted aging mirror. Younger me thinking of what I’ll be like when I’m older, older me chuckling at the naivety of youth. Both happily lost in song.
  • Comeback Kid’s new album Heavy Steps came out last Friday, but I didn’t have time to dive into it until this week. And dive, I did. This is a great hardcore punk album with a nice catchy undertone. Perfect for the gym or air guitar aerobics around the house.
  • The Maine released a new single featuring collaborations with Taking Back Sunday and Charlotte Sands. It’s a nice little track that highlights all three artists well. And it’s great exposure for Charlotte. Her last two EPs have a couple of good solid modern pop-punk songs on them, and the one that interpolates Boys Like Girls’ “Thunder” is a nice standout.
  • Yep, I’m still playing the hell out of that Anxious record. So. Good.
  • Bad Suns’ new album came out yesterday, and I’ve written about it a little in this newsletter already. Solid melodic synth-pop album, but not one that I’ve found myself coming back to a whole lot over the past few months.
  • I checked out Texas King after reading Adam’s review of the new EP and walked away pretty impressed. Kind of a mid 90’s alt-rock sound mixed with The Maine.
  • I went through a couple of different musical phases this week, but coming back to the last two Tiger Army albums was a real treat. I’m really looking forward to anything they do next. I also would kill for someone to re-press that Autopilot Off album, every time I listen to it, I get a little angrier it wasn’t bigger.

The Stats: Over the past week, I listened to 37 different artists and 378 different tracks (558 scrobbles). My most played artist was Dashboard Confessional, and the top album, predictably, was his new one All the Truth That I Can Tell. Here is my Top 9 from last week, and you can follow me on Apple Music and/or Last.fm.

Entertainment Thoughts

  • We finally watched Encanto, and I enjoyed it. Fun little movie. We sure are getting good at computer graphics.
  • I can’t lie, I felt a little let down by Yellowjackets. There was too much of everything I hated about Lost. Where they just do weird shit to do bizarre shit and give you no explanation. Mystery box storytelling that felt unearned with the only goal of ending episodes with a big “moment,” so people would need to watch next week. I thought that made it feel cheap, and there were so many “this makes no gd sense” parts that would just take me completely out of the show as we sat there going, “do the writers think we’re idiots?” I don’t know, soft mediocre to ok, with probably enough intrigue that I’ll force myself to watch the next season. Or read at least read the Wikipedia page.
  • I finished Project Hail Mary and enjoyed it. The same author as The Martian and this had similar themes of science and math, but the concept was a unique one, and I grew to enjoy how the story played out and the two main characters quite a bit.
  • We watched The Worst Person in the World last night, and I came away very impressed. It’s a terrific coming-of-age film portraying someone trying to figure out who they are and what they “want to do” with their life.

Random and Personal Stuff

  • Not a whole lot here this week. Some of Hannah’s extended family is in town, so that’s probably what I’ll be doing this weekend. In fact, we have to head out pretty soon so I should probably wrap this up.
  • I shared photos and some musical memories of Fall Out Boy, All-American Rejects, and Motion City Soundtrack on Instagram this week.

Ten Songs

Here are ten songs that I listened to and loved this week. Some may be new, some may be old, but they all found their way into my life during the past seven days.

  1. The Maine – Loved You A Little
  2. Dashboard Confessional – Burning Heart
  3. Comeback Kid – True to Form
  4. Autopilot Off – Chromatic Fades
  5. Texas King – Not Myself
  6. Circa Survive – Electric Moose
  7. Anxious – Call From You
  8. Bad Suns – Baby Blue Shades
  9. Charlotte Sands – Keep Me Up All Night
  10. Tiger Army – Firefall

This playlist is available on Spotify and Apple Music.

Community Watch

The trending and popular threads in our community this week include:

The most liked post in our forums last week was this one by Craig Manning in the “When We Were Young Festival Adds Second Date” thread.

Previous editions of Liner Notes can be found here.

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