Liner Notes (October 23rd, 2021)

Halloween

This week’s newsletter has thoughts on the latest Apple event and thoughts on internet drama, and the serenity of realizing you don’t need to have an opinion about everything. Then I go over stuff I revisited this week (Cartel, Finch, The Format) as well as share thoughts on new music out this week (ETID, Super American) and other albums I listened to (No Rome, Mom Jeans). And then I gush about how good the new Dune movie is. As always, there’s a playlist of ten songs, and this week’s supporter Q&A post can be found here.

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Review: Incubus – Morning View

It’s amazing what a little visual perspective can do for a band. While many of the 90’s Alt-Rock and nu-metal scene were sledging away in the studio, Incubus decided to create an environment most conducive to the music they wanted to create. The band decided to live in a large, spacious house in Malibu, California. This would be the last record made with bassist Alex “Dirk” Katunich, and he described in interviews that the band, “tried to do that for at least the writing portion of Make Yourself, but we didn’t have enough clout at the time. The idea was to not feel as if you were driving [somewhere] to work on a record. You could just get up and it was a natural extension of your day.” Vocalist Brandon Boyd shared that sentiment in other ways by saying, “every time we’d pull into the street we had the view of the ocean and Pacific Coast Highway. I got a big creative boner every time I’d show up to the house.” And from that, Incubus would give birth to the record now known as Morning View. If Make Yourself was an introduction to the sound that the band would start to round out their repertoire for their career, Morning View was them becoming true artists in every sense of the word.

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Apple Music’s New Mood and Activity Playlists

MacStories has compiled a list of all the new Apple Music playlists added:

What we found was over 250 playlists each designed to fit a mood or activity that use animated cover art with simple line drawings to set them apart from Apple’s other playlist. Although they were announced as Siri playlists during the event on Monday, anyone with an Apple Music subscription can view and play the new playlists in the Music app like any other playlist in the service’s collection.