Liner Notes (May 21st, 2023)

Posted by Jason TateMay 21, 2023

This week’s newsletter has some thoughts on music I enjoyed, as well as some random other thoughts. And there’s a playlist of ten songs I think are worth your time, and this week’s supporter Q&A post can be found here.

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A Few Things

Marvis, my favorite music app for iOS, does Last.fm scrobbling perfectly. It lets you set what you want to consider “listened to” — I go with over 50% — and then it queues up the scrobble to post to Last.fm once you move to the next track. This method avoids many issues I see with other scrobbling apps. Others, especially the ones I’ve used on the Mac, often lead to duplicate scrobbles or sometimes missed scrobbles, usually when you pause a song for more than a few minutes and then return to it. The app I currently use on the Mac, Neptunes, I still think is the best there is because of all the extra features it has. Being able to click the menu bar icon and double check if the last five songs have scrobbled (checkmark next to them) and all the keyboard shortcut integration (loving a song on Apple Music/Last.fm with one keyboard shortcut is paramount). But it’s not perfect. And it’s impacted by the pause issue. I often open Marvis on my phone and manually scrobble the missed song, but I wanted to see if I could do something that worked better when I was sitting at my desk and noticed a song went unrecorded. Using Last.fm’s API, I wrote a simple web app that takes the artist, song, and album and scrobbles what’s passed to it. Then, I created a Shortcut that takes what’s on the clipboard and passes it to my web app. Now, if I notice a song didn’t scrobble, I can right-click the song in Apple Music, go to Copy, and then run the Shortcut from Raycast with a simple keyword. It scrobbles the track and then gives me a notification letting me know it worked. This is a hilariously over-engineered way of doing this, but I still find it faster than manually scrobbling or using my phone. What I’d love is an app to implement the Marvis way of scrobbling, so I’d never even think twice or worry about a song being duplicated or missing.

Music Thoughts

This week’s new music was more about some new singles than it was albums for me. First, the new Boys Like Girls song is so obviously up my alley. It feels very similar to The Night Game with the immaculate production; big synth swells, and Martin’s vocals. Little more guitar, I suppose, but this feels more like a continuation of Love Drunk mixed with his recent solo work. And, as someone that will gladly die on my hill that Love Drunk is one of the most underappreciated great pop records of all time, I’m very, very here for this. I also think the new KennyHoopla song is pretty great. I continue to believe he’s the most exciting new thing in pop-punk, and I am dying for a full length. And Lost Stars released another pop-rock gem. The melodies and lyrical wordplay of this band remind me a lot of Relient K. I don’t know what the band’s current label situation is, but they’re the kind of artists I want to sign.
The new Alex Lahey album gave me a very nice first impression. I plan to spend more time with that through the upcoming week.
I flipped through The Used’s new album, but it wasn’t the style of music I was craving on Friday, so it wasn’t grabbing me at all. I’ll return to it when I feel myself in that mood to see what I think of it, but honestly, I just haven’t been into anything from this band in a long while.
The rest of my week was filled with a whole bunch of music that felt ideally suited for the nice warm weather. MxPx, Slick Shoes, Autopilot Off, The Starting Line; just a bunch of fun, bouncy, upbeat music. And the music and the weather kept me in high spirits. The evenings were spent with a run through Jason Isbell’s catalog. Most of which seems to tie in perfectly with a warm summer night. And, now I’m about to hit play on this Orville Peck album for the first time after seeing it mentioned/recommended in the forum this week.

The Stats: Over the past week, I listened to 74 different artists, 95 different albums, and 715 different tracks (850 scrobbles). That has to be one of my most listened-to music weeks ever. My most played artist of the week was MxPx, with The Ever Passing Moment being my most played album. My playlist was very dominated by the weather getting warmer and the pop-punk vibes being out in full force. Here is my Top 9 from last week, and you can follow me on Apple Music and/or Last.fm.

Entertainment Thoughts

To Catch a Killer was competently made and decently acted, but held down by a mediocre script and felt like something I’ve seen done better a thousand different times.
Our new night show has been The Pacific and four episodes in, it’s not quite Band of Brothers level, but it is still terrific.
Shrinking is graduating to “fantastic” level.

Random and Personal Stuff

Not much else going on this week; I suppose I should finish this up and get it out.

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.

Boys Like Girls – Blood and Sugar
Alex Lahey – Good Time
KennyHoopla – You Need a Hit
Lost Stars – Devil on my Shoulder
happydaze – Day in and Out
Jason Isbell – Flying Over Water
Autopilot Off – Long Way to Fall
Bearings – I Feel it All
Don’t Look Down – Bender
MxPx – Misplaced Memories

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 williamryankey in the “Yellowcard” thread.

LOL. Yeah, that’s about right.

Previous editions of Liner Notes can be found here.

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