Liner Notes (January 15th, 2022)

Star Wars

Another Saturday night online writing about pop-punk.

In this week’s newsletter, I detail how I am showing my nine most listened to albums for the week in an iOS widget, and then go into a deep dive on music I listened to this week (Drive-Thru Records era pop-punk, Northstar, Lunar Vacation, Kevin Devine) as well as some of the entertainment I consumed. As always, there’s a playlist of ten songs I enjoyed, and this week’s supporter Q&A post can be found here.

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Ben Auld – “O Athena!” (Music Premiere)

Ben Auld

Today I’m excited to share the latest single for indie folk songwriter Ben Auld for the song, “O Athena!” The track comes from his upcoming debut LP Lemongrass, that hits the streets on February 15th. Auld shared this about the song:

This is possibly the oldest song on the album and it stuck around because I could imagine an audience singing along to it. Sufjan’s Illinois is one of my favorite albums ever and I wanted to create something that had a similar feeling of exultation. I can’t remember where the chorus lyrics came from, I guess I felt they fit this theme of praising or elevating people. Making a new friend or founding a new relationship can make people so elated and joyous. This song tries to express that period of time before things settle back to normality. The recording process for each song is slightly different and with this I wanted it to feel like it had depth without it being drenched in reverbs. So I recorded the bass, drums and rhythm guitars to cassette and then used an 8 track to layer the keys and picked guitars. Then I bounced that all to another 4 track and recorded the vocals. Each time a layer was bounced it got pushed down in the mix and so you have this sort of stratification effect.

Your next indie singer-songwriter obsession has arrived.

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