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The 25 Years You Have Come to Fear the Most

Dashboard Confessional
Jason Tate

Chris Black reflects on Dashboard Confessional’s The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most for GQ:

It was early December, but the room was so packed that the walls were sweating. He got up on stage alone, and the room screamed every lyric back to him in a way that I still haven’t experienced. People believed every word he said and wanted to be in a room full of people who felt the same way. It was one of those rare moments, like when I saw The xx play The Mercury Lounge, that I just knew how big this thing was going to get.

MUNA Talk With Polyester

MUNA
Jason Tate

MUNA talked with Polyester about their upcoming album:

The way that I see it is probably the way that I see most growth in life, which is: it’s a spiral. So if you look at our first record About U, I think we were existing in this kind of aesthetically punk space. And the sound was like dark pop. And I think that if you look at what we’ve done with Dancing on the Wall, it’s a more elevated, more expanded version of that thing. I think it really speaks to the people that we were when we started this project, but we have more resources, and we have more experience with each other. It’s the album that I think we would be so over the moon that we made if you could have told us when we were 20.

Parkway Drive Fire Former Employee

Parkway Drive
Jason Tate

Parkway Drive have fired a former employee after they pleaded guilty to a sex offense.

“This happened before we were a band, however we bear moral responsibility for contracting him from 2003, on and off over the years. While he hasn’t toured with us since 2017, more recently he’s been part of our Australian online merch team.

“When the band heard about this, we terminated his contract immediately. He’s no longer involved with Parkway Drive in any capacity. This is heartbreaking on a very human scale.’

Harry Styles Tops the Charts Again

Harry Styles
Jason Tate

Harry Styles still has the number one album in the country. Sturgill Simpson’s record debut at number three despite not having a streaming release.

Johnny Blue Skies (formerly Sturgill Simpson) & the Dark Clouds’ Mutiny After Midnight debuts at No. 3 with 59,000 equivalent album units earned — all from physical album sales. It’s the best week yet, by units earned or album sales, for the artist. It’s the second top 10-charting project for Simpson, following the No. 3-peaking A Sailor’s Guide to Earth in 2016. Mutiny After Midnight is currently only available on CD, vinyl and cassette. No release date has been announced for a streaming version or a digital download for purchase.

Dave Grohl Chats With the Guardian

Dave Grohl
Jason Tate

Dave Grohl talked with The Guardian:

He’s more forthcoming about the brilliant hardcore punk rager Of All People, which begins: “Of all people, you survived / When no one else could stay alive / You know you should be dead / But you’re alive instead.” He wrote it “after bumping into a drug dealer from the 90s that was getting everyone fucked up on heroin. I hadn’t seen them in 30 years, and they’re alive, healthy and sober. I was so happy that this person survived, while at the same time, I was devastated, because of all of the people I know that we’ve lost to exactly that drug” – Cobain was a heroin user. “I was so fucking angry, but at the same time so grateful to see them alive and well. Again, a conversation within myself, feeling so conflicted and divided. When I read the lyrics back, I mentioned them to my therapist: is this survivor’s guilt?”

Olivia Rodrigo Talks New Album

Olivia Rodrigo
Jason Tate

Olivia Rodrigo talked with Vogue about her new album:

The fan theories were right: these are all love songs, but specifically about the obsession and anxiety of it – or the depression when your lover is gone. They’re “sad love songs”, she’ll later write over email. “I realised all my favourite romantic love songs were beautiful because they had a tinge of fear or yearning in them.”

The first is smooth, trippy soft rock about the spirituality of finding the man of your dreams. Her voice sounds so different – laid-back and mature. Once or twice, she tells me, she’s had premonitions of her relationships. It’s part feminine intuition, part manifestation, but also maybe the high achiever in her. “I’m very stubborn and if I like someone, I’m like, ‘Yo, this is going to happen. This is rare! Let’s do it.’” The kismet feeling is embodied in the chorus. “The person that the song is about is great,” she says, grinning.

Apple Photo’s (Lack Of) Concert Identification

Apple
Jason Tate

Chris Devers, writing about how Apple Photo’s “concert tagging feature” often fails:

This would be a lot less annoying if Apple provided some basic tools to help out here.

If we could edit the concert event tags, we could fix the problem ourselves. Alas, the tags are added (or not) automatically, and we have no way to control them. Better still, if we could edit the tags to note which artist was performing, that would also help, particularly for events where two or more names were on the lineup. If the software gave greater weight to geotags, that might help. Few events span miles, nevermind dozens of miles, so if the photos are of different places, they shouldn’t be grouped together as the same event.

Dave Grohl Talks with Mojo

Foo Fighters
Jason Tate

Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters talked with Mojo in a new interview:

“There was no plan to make an album,” Grohl tells MOJO’s David Fricke. However, he reports that after a year of writing and listening back to the “40 or 50 instrumentals” he had amassed, he found one stretch of eight recordings that were “punchy, fast, energetic” which felt like the seeds of a new Foos’ album. “I said, ‘That’s what we need…’” recalls Grohl.

Lorde Leaves Universal Music Group

Lorde
Jason Tate

Lorde has decided to leave Universal Music.

“I adore them, they’re incredible people, and I have had an amazing experience with them,” she said about her time with UMG. “But the truth is that a 12-year-old girl pre-signed and pre-sold her creative output before she knew what it would be like and before she knew what she was signing away.”

Geoff Rickly Talks Perfume and Thursday

Thursday
Jason Tate

Geoff Rickly of Thursday talked with Human Pursuits:

We’ve settled into a comfortable spot now—highly influential and beloved by cerebral elements of the fandom—but not the leading band by any populist metric.

That’s probably where we always belonged, but because we were doing something different before everyone else, there was a moment where we were the band to watch—sort of like Turnstile is now. We were selling out 5,000 capacity theatres, right at that point of being as big as you can get without being a household name. It happened a year into Full Collapse being out. That record sold 700 copies the week it was released; it was not a hit. Then all of a sudden, boom, it was. None of us knew how deal with it; there was no PR training.

Part two can be found here:

I’m really proud of Thursday that we waited until the hype died down. When you get back together, you’re playing your biggest shows ever, selling 3,000 tickets in huge rooms. You can do that once or twice on a reunion, but if you become a band again, you have to re-normalise. We waited until we had normalized and until we knew each other a little bit. We wrote a lot of songs that we didn’t release that were, quite frankly, bad.

Spotify to Let Your Edit Your Algorithm

Jason Tate

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

This Taste Profile is key to Spotify’s recommendations, including personalized playlists like Discover Weekly, Made For You recommendations, and the year-end review known as Spotify Wrapped, among other things. 

Starting with Premium listeners initially in New Zealand, Spotify will allow users to see all their listening data in one place in the app, including music, podcasts, and audiobooks. Users will then be able to edit this profile and even fine-tune future recommendations by asking for more or less of a certain vibe. After doing so, the app’s home page will reflect a different set of suggestions.

I Am the Avalanche Talk New Album

I Am the Avalanche
Jason Tate

I Am the Avalanche talked with Rock Sound about their upcoming album:

Whether I was procrastinating or not, I wrote the lyrics when it was the exact right time for me to write them. It came after I experienced the most insane amount of loss. At the time, part of me was like, ‘Most of the lyrics aren’t written yet, so I guess the record’s never going to get done.’ It was a sunny day though, so I went to the park by my apartment, and I wrote the first lyrics. It killed me for the next three days. I got it off my chest, and it took so much out of me physically and mentally, but I saw the result. I went into the studio around three days after I wrote that first song. I sang it in the vocal booth, and when I heard it back, I became empowered. I knew that I needed to see it through.