I think my biggest draw to music is the emotion it pulls from me when listening to a great song. That feeling where you experience the song with the entirety of your being. Everything fades away and all that matters in that moment is the space between notes, ears, and heart. Copeland’s upcoming album, Ixora, embodies everything I search for in music.
On December 2nd, 2014, I had the chance to sit down and talk with Aaron Marsh of Copeland about their new album Ixora, the band’s future, and what it was like to get back together.
On December 26th, 2014, Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties played their first ever full-band show at The Paradise in Boston, MA. You can watch the entire set – 36 minutes of songs about getting used to being alone – after the jump. Read More “Chorus TV: Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties”
I love most genres of music, but I have a special place in my heart for hardcore music – Terror, Hatebreed, etc. You know who else loves hardcore music? Chad Gilbert from New Found Glory. I thought it would be cool to sit down and talk about one of his favorite hardcore bands, Madball. So we went to Starbucks in Portland, OR and talked about exactly that – Madball, and memories he’s had with them. If you’ve never listened/heard of Madball before, definitely give this a read and check them out.
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I came up with an idea a few months ago that I put to the test recently. A couple of weeks ago I shut off the lights, eliminated all distractions, closed my eyes, and played Walk the Moon’s Talking is Hard for the first time, front to back. My hope was that I could connect completely with the music pouring from the speakers and produce completely candid thoughts about the songs. Much like a movie in a theater, music deserves to be played directly to the viewer. It’s tough to do that these days. You’re listening… but are you really?
Walk the Moon is a four piece band out of Cincinnati and they’ve been churning out delicious alt-pop songs since ’08. They had me hooked with “Anna Sun” two years ago from their self-titled, which delivered an incredibly solid line-up of tracks. I don’t know what happened in the past two years, because Talking is Hard is an improvement on Walk the Moon in every way.
Read More “Walk the Moon – Talking is Hard”
“Your music helped save my life.”
These words are so simple, so jarring and so potent. Almost every musician has heard them at one point in time. While some may be exaggerated and overstated, the fact remains that music is one of the strongest voices in this world and its impact can never be underestimated.
How is this relevant, you ask? Copeland helped save my life.
Read More “Copeland – Ixora”
Frontman Nathan Willett talks about getting loose and chaotic again on Cold War Kids latest record Hold My Home, not overthinking during the writing process, what’s he’s learned from side project French Style Furs, and how a high work ethic has kept the band going strong for 10 years.
Over the past five or so years, few artists have displayed progression and growth more interesting to watch than Taylor Swift’s. In 2008, she was a global superstar with a multiplatinum album and a few world-conquering singles. In 2009, she was the Grammy darling. In 2010, she did the unthinkable for a pop artist of her stature and wrote an entire album without a single co-write. In 2012, she released her most ambitious work to date with a record that hopped half-a-dozen genres and showed immense growth in songwriting craft. And this past summer, she announced arguably the biggest move of her career so far by bidding farewell to country and fully embracing pop music.
In some ways, Taylor’s move to pop wasn’t terribly surprising. The biggest singles from 2012’s Red, “We Are Never Getting Back Together” and “I Knew You Were Trouble,” were both deliriously catchy pop gems, while 2010’s Speak Now was arguably just a pop album dressed up in organic full-band country arrangements. But for an artist who got her start in Nashville and who always made storytelling the core of her songs, the news that Swift was going to go full pop on her fifth album—titled 1989—truly was shocking.
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Going through a crucible has the tendency to change a person and make them stronger. That was the case for pop-punk/piano-pop songsmith Andrew McMahon when he was diagnosed with leukemia in 2005. The Something Corporate frontman, already the mastermind behind a pair of exceptional LPs with his former band, finished mastering his greatest record, 2005’s Everything in Transit, the day he was diagnosed. Remarkably, the CD still released on schedule, despite the fact that McMahon had to cancel his tours and undergo chemotherapy. Because of that fact, it became the kind of record that transcended its genre. For fans, it was simultaneously an album that could be a personal soundtrack as well as the soundtrack to McMahon’s inspiring rise-from-the-ashes recovery.
Read More “Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness – Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness”
Andrew Hozier-Byrne talks about his No. 2 charting debut album, performing on Saturday Night Live, his Irish background, and reflecting on the human experience as honestly as possible.
“Has it really been 10 years?”
That’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot this fall, because the autumn of 2004 was one of the most important seasons of my life. It was my most paramount musically formative stage. I’d always loved music, even leading up to that season: listening to the radio, making cassette tape copies of my brother’s CDs, playing the piano, jamming the few albums I owned repeatedly in the afternoons after school, downloading tracks off Limewire and making mix CDs. But I never fully understood the impact a song or album could have on my life until the fall of 2004. Until Futures.
Lead singer Jordan Pundik discusses New Found Glory’s transition to becoming a four-piece, the cathartic nature of latest album Resurrection, and what still excites him about making music after 17 years.
I can’t say Resurrection is inappropriately titled. New Found Glory’s eighth studio LP is, ugh, a ~*return to form*~ in just about every way. This always happens when the South Florida now-quartet faces some sort of adversity — they regress toward the mean. Coming Home was creative and about as daring as New Found Glory has ever gotten but it didn’t work out the way it was supposed to, so they wrote Not Without A Fight, the most polar opposite of Coming Home possible while still remaining in the very specifically defined realm of pop-punk inhabited by New Found Glory music. Now, guitarist and lyricist Steve Klein gets kicked out of the band and we get Resurrection, which is nothing more than a confirmation that yes, in fact, New Found Glory is still a band, they still exist, and yes, in fact, they can still write New Found Glory songs. Great!
Not so great is the fact that new-school pop-punk’s forefathers have regressed so far toward their own mean that they’ve essentially parodied themselves. Resurrection is significantly more enjoyable for me when I pretend it’s a band of people I don’t know jokingly writing songs pretending to be New Found Glory. This is now a band whose career is driven almost entirely by nostalgia; they draw crowds consisting of either young pop-punk fans who listen to them because they feel like they’re supposed to, or slightly older people who want to hear the hits and don’t care much for new material. That’s perfectly fine: Taking Back Sunday is currently romping across that same exact career arc, but while TBS is taking it upon themselves to change their sound, New Found Glory is retreating for whatever comes easiest. The songs on Resurrection have already been written by this band dozens of times before.
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When I sat down to write this review, I found myself staring at Microsoft Word’s blinking cursor for at least 10 minutes, coming up blank. That’s not a common occurrence for me. Usually, when I write a review, it comes out fully formed, all in one sitting. But how could I review an album such as this? What could I say that would speak to the experiences of other listeners and not just my own? The struggle was born from the fact that Yellowcard’s last album, Southern Air, became one of the most personal records in my life two years ago. That album came out toward the end of summer 2012, the summer before my senior year in college. It was my last summer in my hometown, my last summer before the real world set in, and songs like “Southern Air” and “Always Summer” just felt so fitting. Suffice to say that listening to an album that ends with the line “this will always be home” is particularly resonant when you’re driving away and don’t really know where your next “home” is going to be.
Needless to say, Southern Air is my favorite Yellowcard album, and probably always will be. I connected with it like people older than me connected with Ocean Avenue back in 2003, and I was worried that, like them, I’d have to deal with a follow-up that completely misplaced the magic of its predecessor. But while Lift a Sail, Yellowcard’s latest record, is a departure from the anthemic beachside sound of the band’s last couple albums, it isn’t a departure in the same way 2006’s Lights and Sounds was. Sure, both records shift in a more “rock” focused direction, both are darker than their predecessors, and both are highly ambitious. The difference is that, where Lights and Sound was directionless and dull, Lift a Sail is the portrait of a band that has more to say right now than at any other point in their career.
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Andrew McMahon explains why his new Wilderness project is the most focused thing he’s done in years, touches on the themes of storytelling and fatherhood, and unpacks his lifelong obsessions with dreams and the sky.