Taylor Swift Tops the Charts Again

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift, once again, has the number one album in the country:

Taylor Swift’s Folklore spends a fifth straight week at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, tying Lil Baby’s My Turn for the most weeks atop the list in 2020. Folklore further becomes the first album to rule for five weeks in a row at No. 1 since Drake’s Scorpion also logged its first frames at No. 1 (July 14-Aug. 11, 2018-dated charts).

Sponsor: My Thanks to Albums

Albums

My thanks to the new version of the Albums app for sponsoring the website this week.

Albums is an app built for those who like to listen to their music as albums, as a whole, and comes with a variety of great new features. The app’s been redesigned and now pulls in more production credits, lets you sort your collection based on record label, producer, and various other categories. It also has a new Insights feature to highlight album anniversaries or remind you of albums you loved in high school. And, there’s a new Stats feature that gives you more information about your listening habits. Albums also supports Last.fm scrobbling built in.

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Liner Notes (August 28th, 2020)

Sky

This week’s newsletter looks at my two favorite albums this week: Ruston Kelly and PVRIS, and shares some early thoughts on the new Slick Shoes album. There’s also commentary on other music I like this week and the entertainment I consumed. Plus, as always, a playlist of ten songs I liked and all that jazz. This week’s supporter Q&A post can be found here.

If you’d like this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week (it’s free and available to everyone), you can sign up here.

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Review: Ruston Kelly – Shape & Destroy

On his debut album, 2018’s sublime Dying Star, Ruston Kelly grappled with addiction and found his way to sobriety. It was a raw, revealing, heart-wrenching record, wrought with struggle and pain and rendered incredibly moving by what looked, at the time, like a hard-won happy ending. Kelly wrote the album after getting sober, falling in love, and getting married, to country star Kacey Musgraves. “I’m a dying star, front seat of your car/Where you brave the cold and come find me falling apart/Brought me out of the dark/I went way too far this time.” So Kelly sang on Dying Star’s eponymous song and penultimate track. In the album’s liner notes, he explained the lyrics and the idea of the song, which were inspired directly by the support Musgraves lent to him when he needed a little help pulling himself out of the darkness:

Stars are born and will die to be born as new stars again. A supernova brings life anew to the universe. A galactic baptism of sorts.

This song is an ode to the love between Kacey and I. There were many nights during the making of this record where I broke down in her car from the weight of who I had been. And how deep below I felt under it. And she every time, with patience and that special redemptive power only great women possess, reminded me I’m not that man anymore. No matter who or where you are, you have your thorn. It is my belief that’s why we are alive on this earth. To see the glow in the cracks. Light in the tunnel. Suffering is a prerequisite to joy in my opinion. But it’s also the human element that connects us all.

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Goalkeeper – “Just Say it” (Video Premiere)

Goalkeeper

Today we’re excited to bring you the premiere of Goalkeeper’s new video for “Just Say It.”

Goalkeeper are a pop-punk band out of Philadelphia signed to Lost Music Collective. They’ll be releasing their new EP, Life in Slow Motion, on September 25th. The album produced by Kevin Mahoney of Hit The Lights/Joywave, engineered by Will Pugh of Cartel, and mixed & mastered by Seb Barlow. Like pop-punk? You’re probably gonna like this.

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