Hayley Williams has shared her favorite things of 2020 with Rolling Stone:
Like the rest of us, Williams has been turning to her own musical creature comforts during this pandemic: Jessica Pratt, Erykah Badu, the voice of Billie Eilish’s mom as she cooks vegan food on Instagram Live. The Paramore vocalist also dives into the books, movies and hobbies she’s consumed over the past eleven months, the mistake she learned the most from this year, and what she hopes to accomplish in 2021.
BTS once again has the number one album in the country:
BTS lands its fifth No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart, as Be bows atop the tally. The set, which was released via Big Hit Entertainment on Nov. 20, arrives with 242,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending Nov. 26, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data. Be is the second chart-topper of 2020 for the pop group, following Map of the Soul: 7, which debuted at No. 1 on the chart dated March 7.
Pale Waves talked with Alt. Press about their new album:
I feel like this album is childhood for me. It’s the music that I grew up with. And I didn’t want to do another record that was really ’80s-inspired synth-pop music. I was done with that. I was over it. And I wanted to move on. And this is what I know best. This is what I’ve only ever known. And now this is the core of me. This is what founded my love for music and from the earliest days. So it’s the easiest kind of music for me to write. And of course, Avril is a massive inspiration. There’s no denying that she was my childhood hero.
AC/DC have the number one album in the country this week:
The new studio effort was released via Columbia Records on Nov. 13 and starts with 117,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending Nov. 19, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data. AC/DC previously hit No. 1 with 2008’s Black Ice and 1981’s For Those About to Rock (We Salute You). All told, Power Up is AC/DC’s 26th charting album, and 10th top 10.
David Pierce, writing for Protocol:
One easy knock on music-streaming services is that they’re all the same. Their libraries may differ slightly at the margins, but they all have about the same 60 million or so songs in their catalog. And Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” sounds pretty much the same anywhere you play it.
Except on YouTube. There you can watch the original version, but also the Carpool Karaoke version, a duet Carey did with Justin Bieber, the scene from “Love Actually” that features the song, and countless live performances, covers and remixes. Want to learn a dance to the song in time for this year’s holidays? Want to learn to play the song on the guitar or piano? Want to hear a smash-cut version of President Trump singing the song? Want to know how that song got to be so irritatingly ubiquitous? That’s all on the first page of the YouTube search results. YouTube has a corpus of unique music content that none of its rivals can touch.
Vinnie has done a new track-by-track breakdown of the latest I Am the Avalanche album for Substream:
“Tokyo”: “In this song we pay homage to a man who showed I Am the Avalanche the utmost love and support when we were getting our start. Mikey had this riff and we jammed on it and it felt very No Use For A Name. So I carried that into the lyrics. Rest well, Tony Sly.”
“Concrete”: “This song was in the first batch that we wrote the music for. I get so sick of myself sometimes. Grateful for my family and friends who continue to be there for me. That must be daunting. Respect.”
Phoebe Bridgers and Metallica’s Lars Ulrich interviewed each other over at Rolling Stone:
It was the strangest fucking summer. Because I was most on the front lines, it left me kind of shell-shocked. It really started more as a street fight. It was like, “Wait a minute, one of our songs is playing on a bunch of radio stations in the Midwest?” It was a song we hadn’t released yet. So we started tracing it back, and it was like, “Napster, what the fuck?” The environment we were brought up in was if somebody fucked with you, we’d just go after them. And then all of a sudden the lights came on, the whole world was watching.
It left certainly a pretty crazy taste in my mouth, especially because everybody was my friend: “You’re doing such a great job. We support you. What can I do to help you? Call me.” And then, as soon as I was out there and I looked behind, there was not a single person behind me. Obviously, I had the support of the band, but it was really weird.
The Forty Five has a great new oral history all about Decaydance Records. The part about Snakes on a Plane, specifically, brought back quite a few memories:
Midtown had broken up so Gabe was trying to figure out what he was going to do next. He had a song called ‘Bring it’ he was working on that had a cool vibe. Sisky from Academy called and said, ‘There’s a movie called Snakes on a Plane that might be the worst movie of all time. We should try to get our song ‘Black Mamba’ in it’. A friend of mine was the music supervisor on the movie, so I called him and asked if we could get the song in. He said there weren’t going to be songs in the movie, only score, but I convinced him to let us do a soundtrack. We went to Gabe and told him he needed to add some parts to ‘Bring it’ to be about snakes on a plane. He wasn’t super happy with me at the time but he was a team player.
The new version of Capo has been released:
The new chord detection engine in Capo 4 is powered by a deep neural network that was developed and trained in-house at SuperMegaUltraGroovy using proprietary tools. “Our chord detection has always used some form of machine learning, but what we’re shipping with Capo 4 is a huge leap forward for us,” says Liscio. “It’s far more accurate, detects many more chords, and now it can even identify inversions.” Capo’s support for inversions allows it to identify the lowest note played in any given chord. For example, it can now distinguish between a C major chord that is played with a C, an E, or a G in the bass.
Music instrument retailer Guitar Center, which has been beset by mounting debt for years, says it expects to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after reaching a debt-reduction deal with its key stakeholders.
It is with no shock that I must report: Morrissey still sucks.
In his statement, Morrissey wrote: “BMG have appointed a new Executive who does not want another Morrissey album. Instead, the new BMG Executive has announced new plans for ‘diversity’ within BMG’s artist roster, and all projected BMG Morrissey releases/reissues have been scrapped. This news is perfectly in keeping with the relentless galvanic horror of 2020.”
Bandcamp have launched a new live streaming service:
Today we’re announcing Bandcamp Live, a new ticketed live streaming service that makes it easy for artists to perform for and connect with their fans, and for fans to directly support the artists they love.
Bandcamp Live is simple to set up, even if you’ve never streamed before, and is fully integrated with the rest of Bandcamp. This has several benefits: we automatically notify your fans when you announce a show, it’s easy to buy a ticket since so many people already have a Bandcamp account and saved credit card, and new buyers become your followers (and have the option to join your mailing list). You can also showcase your music and merchandise right alongside your stream in a virtual merch table.
This looks really well thought out and integrated into the platform.
Motion City Soundtrack talked with The Alternative about their hiatus and other topics:
“I’ve said this before; Josh and Matt and I, we’ve sent ideas back and forth intermittently since 2006,” Pierre says. “There is music to be made; I feel that. There are songs that I’m like, Fuck, this could be amazing, I’ve got this ditty that’s perfect. For me, I’ve found I’m much more concept-driven; I can’t write something unless I’ve got this big ridiculous plan. We do have a lot of songs and I think we could put this thing together if we could all get on the same page. But with the pandemic….”
Around the time My Dinosaur Life came out, the band members were writing parts on their own and sending them to each other, and they quickly came to realize how different that is from all being in the same room to hammer things out. It’s why they’re hesitant to try and make new music remotely during this continued lockdown period. “That emotion that happens in the room in those moments is what MCS is,” Cain says. “We could probably make something really cool as a mail-in record, but I worry about it having the substance we need to have.”
Zeynep Tufekci, writing at The Atlantic, first with the good news:
The end may be near for the pestilence that has haunted the world this year. Good news is arriving on almost every front: treatments, vaccines, and our understanding of this coronavirus.
Pfizer and BioNTech have announced a stunning success rate in their early Phase 3 vaccine trials—if it holds up, it will be a game changer. Treatments have gotten better too. A monoclonal antibody drug—similar to what President Donald Trump and former Governor Chris Christie received—just earned emergency-use authorization from the FDA. Dexamethasone—a cheap, generic corticosteroid—cut the death rate by a third for severe COVID-19 cases in a clinical trial.
Doctors and nurses have much more expertise in managing cases, even in using nonmedical interventions like proning, which can improve patients’ breathing capacity simply by positioning them facedown. Health-care workers are also practicing fortified infection-control protocols, including universal masking in medical settings.
Our testing capacity has greatly expanded, and people are getting their results much more quickly. We may soon get cheaper, saliva-based rapid tests that people can administer on their own, itself a potential game changer.
And then with the kicker:
The best way to prepare would have been to enter this phase with as few cases as possible. In exponential processes like epidemics, the baseline matters a great deal. Once the numbers are this large, it’s very easy for them to get much larger, very quickly — and they will. When we start with half a million confirmed cases a week, as we had in mid-October, it’s like a runaway train. Only a few weeks later, we are already at about 1 million cases a week, with no sign of slowing down.
Americans are reporting higher numbers of contacts compared with the spring, probably because of quarantine fatigue and confusing guidance. It’s hard to keep up a restricted life. But what we’re facing now isn’t forever.
It’s time to buckle up and lock ourselves down again, and to do so with fresh vigilance. Remember: We are barely nine or 10 months into this pandemic, and we have not experienced a full-blown fall or winter season. Everything that we may have done somewhat cautiously — and gotten away with — in summer may carry a higher risk now, because the conditions are different and the case baseline is much higher.
Federico has launched the new version of his MusicBot Shortcut via MacStories. It includes some nifty Chorus.fm integrations to pull in our news feed as well.
The result is MusicBot 1.1, the first substantial update to the original shortcut that introduces full support for iOS 14’s compact UI and Home Screen widgets, Shazam integration, the ability to read music news and check release dates inside MusicBot, plus other fixes and enhancements.