Preceding the release of My Days of 58, the Americana legend once known as Smog discusses his Yorkshire youth, why Spotify is like the mafia and the bleak state of AI

We got married to [Smog’s] Our Anniversary. When you write songs, do you think about how listeners might carry them into their own lives, or do the songs stop being yours after they are done? Vanearle
When I wrote [2019’s] Watch Me Get Married, I thought maybe people would have that as their wedding song. But mostly it’s inconceivable what people are gonna do with a song. I don’t think about it too much because there are 100,000 places where it’s gonna live. Have I ever heard about any inappropriate uses of songs? I think having Our Anniversary as a wedding song is a little surprising, but maybe they’re realists.

As an appreciator of dub, if you could spend a week in a studio to collaborate with any dub artist at their peak, who would you go for? albertoayler
I’d have to say Lee “Scratch” Perry just because he was so crazy. He was like a little kid – just infectious excitement. I think that he would have been easy to hang out with. But also, King Tubby was such a minimalist and I’d be curious about how he determined when enough was enough – investing so much power in the fewest elements. Have Fun With God [the 2014 dub remix album of 2013’s Dream River] was very traditional – all the moves were taken from 70s Jamaican records. Maybe once is enough. But I do like the idea of recycling recorded things to make something else – that’s what initially attracted me to dub. If I did [a new remix album], I may do a chopped and screwed record.

The house will be meticulously restored to its early 1960s appearance and feature a never-before-seen archive

Pop star and former Disney Channel darling is currently tangled up in celebrity mom drama after Ashley Tisdale penned a scathing op-ed about the group’s ‘mean girl behavior’

South London house to feature never-before-seen archival items and creative workshops for young people

On the evening of 6 July 1972, thousands of young people across the UK had their lives changed when the sight of David Bowie performing Starman on Top of the Pops was beamed into their living rooms.

Come the end of 2027, Bowie fans will be able to walk the very floorboards where the young David Jones had his own Damascene cultural conversion, when his childhood home in south London, is opened to the public for the first time.

(Warner)
In this recording of the eight Impromptus, some of Schubert’s most profound music, Lu cements his place as a serious talent

Eric Lu was a worthy if controversial winner of the Chopin international piano competition in October, having won the Leeds event seven years ago: how many springboards should one pianist seek? What is certain is that this latest Schubert recording, following on from his release of the late sonatas late in 2022, reveals a rewardingly mature, un-egotistical approach to the eight Impromptus, some of the composer’s most profound music.

Lu is very much attuned to the way in which Schubert creates overarching structures, conjuring a mesmerising feeling of stasis with music that’s alive with detail under the surface – in his performances of several of them, time really does seem to stand still. Right from the lonely opening of Op 90 No 1, he draws the ear in with the scope of his phrasing: even though his playing can be weightier than some, his lines go on and on into the distance and corners are smoothly turned, with the dramatic passages growing out of what has come before. Perhaps these performances aren’t yet quite distinctive enough to make this recording top choice in a crowded field, but they certainly back up the Chopin judges’ decision: Lu is a serious talent.

(PIAS)
The Jarman brothers’ ninth album adds a little 80s pop sheen to their distorted guitars and confident songwriting, while always sounding exactly like the indie stalwarts

Last summer, the BBC broadcast an eight-part podcast called The Rise and Fall of Indie Sleaze. Its third episode heavily featured the Cribs’ bassist and vocalist Gary Jarman talking about his band’s first flush of mid-00s fame. It centred on their 2005 single Hey Scenesters!, from which the episode also took its name. It was a curious choice: on close examination, Hey Scenesters! wasn’t a celebration of what some people unfortunately dubbed the New Rock Revolution so much as the sound of Jarman and his bandmate brothers poking fun at it.

There was the peculiar dichotomy of the Cribs in a nutshell. They were a band so of the mid-00s moment that they were nearly signed to a record label founded by Myspace. But they always seemed slightly apart from the scene. They were certainly less voracious in the pursuit of mainstream success than contemporaries Razorlight or Kaiser Chiefs: “A cash injection, a nasty infection – don’t regret it,” offers a song from their ninth album, Selling a Vibe, with the pointed title Self Respect. They were more in tune with what their sometime-producer Edwyn Collins called “proper indie” from a pre-Britpop age, when “indie” indicated not a predilection for skinny jeans and trilby hats, but something set apart from the mainstream that viewed the attentions of Top of the Pops and the tabloid press with deep suspicion and balanced limited commercial ambitions against artistic freedom. It was a point underlined by the kind of artists who gave them co-signs. Quite aside from the former frontman of Orange Juice, there was Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, Johnny Marr – who briefly joined the Cribs, co-writing 2009’s Ignore the Ignorant – and the late producer/engineer Steve Albini.

Somewhere between record label and artist project, False Aralia harks back to microhouse and dub techno with its deep, detailed productions

From San Francisco
Recommended if you like Rhythm and Sound, Ricardo Villalobos, Vladislav Delay
Up next Double LP from Topdown Dialectic released in spring

False Aralia disappears into a misty gulch somewhere between record label and artist project. It’s ostensibly a label, where each EP has a different named artist, and each sleeve, designed by Nick Almquist, features a different abstract expressionist monochrome doodle. But all the tracks are numbered, not named, and each EP is actually the work of just one producer, Izaak Schlossman (credited as IS), joined by a changing cast of collaborators.

The musician’s elegant electropop marked him out as one of the ‘cool French dudes’, before an attempt to literally crash the Song Contest fell badly flat. Now back with an adventurous new album, he talks about the man who stole his identity and why he doesn’t care for ‘good taste’

A few years ago, a stranger stole Sébastien Tellier’s identity. The impostor – sporting the musician’s trademark sunglasses and beard – posed as the Frenchman at fancy parties, nabbed free clothes from Chanel (Tellier used to be an ambassador for the brand), and even held meetings with bosses from Hollywood studios (Tellier has dabbled in soundtrack work). “He [also] took a lot of drugs like ketamine in front of a lot of people,” Tellier continues with perfect nonchalance from his Paris home, sunglasses and beard present and correct. The crime was only rumbled when a confused woman got in touch to tell him she’d been partying with “Sébastien Tellier” in France only to see on Instagram that the real Tellier was playing a gig in Belgium.

This experience has been alchemised into pop gold via Copycat, a sparkly synthpop workout on his upcoming eighth album, Kiss the Beast. “My name you steal it / Hat and success,” Tellier croons for the song’s chorus over a chunky bassline, disco strings and synths that crackle and spark like fireworks. It’s typical Tellier, mixing the serious – things got so bad with the impostor that Tellier was briefly forced to show his passport at the school gates when collecting his two small children – with the playfully naive.

The Swedish star says ‘Sexistential’ is ‘like a spaceship coming through the atmosphere at a really high speed and crash landing’

The rapper’s recent cosying up to the Trump administration has upset a lot of her fans, but is she playing the long game?

Starships are meant to fly, but Nicki Minaj’s musical career is now doing a Maga-propelled nosedive. For the past few months, the rapper and former gay icon has been horrifying many of her fans by cosying up to the Trump administration.

In November, for example, Minaj shared a post by Donald Trump about the treatment of Christians in Nigeria and agreed to collaborate with the administration on awareness around the issue. Then, in December, the rapper made a surprise appearance at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest convention, where she heaped praise on the late Charlie Kirk (who once said Minaj was not a good role model for “18-year-old Black girls”) and the vice-president, JD Vance. She also accidentally called Vance an “assassin” while talking to Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, but was quickly forgiven for her word choice. “I love this woman,” Erika Kirk proclaimed after the weird gaffe.

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Engaging in creativity can reduce depression, improve immunity and delay ageing – all while you’re having fun

For some reason, we have collectively agreed that new year is the time to reinvent ourselves. The problem, for many people, is that we’ve tried all the usual health kicks – running, yoga, meditation, the latest diets – even if we haven’t really enjoyed them, in a bid to improve our minds and bodies. But have any of us given as much thought to creativity? Allow me to suggest that this year be a time to embrace the arts.

Ever since our Paleolithic ancestors began painting caves, carving figurines, dancing and singing, engaging in the arts has been interwoven with health and healing. Look through the early writings of every major medical tradition around the world and you find the arts. What is much newer – and rapidly accelerating over the past two decades – is a blossoming scientific evidence-base identifying and quantifying exactly what the health benefits of the arts are.

Behind its lavish ‘nun-core’ aesthetic, the Spanish star’s hit album pushes us to think beyond good and evil – to see that we contain multitudes

I went into Lux primed not to like it. Not because I doubt Rosalía’s virtuosic talents or her intense intellectual curiosity, but because the album’s promotional campaign had already done too much work on my nerves. The rollout was relentless: thirsty reels teasing the album on social media, fashion-forward mysticism, even bringing Madrid’s city centre to a halt – everything about it felt designed to send the message that this is less a set of songs than a global event demanding reverence.

Over the past decade, Rosalía has become Spain’s biggest pop export, and Lux appears to inaugurate her imperial phase. The album debuted at No 1 in five countries, was voted the Guardian’s album of the year, broke streaming records on Spotify, and reached No 4 in the US and UK charts, where non-anglophone pop rarely thrives. Multilingual and stylistically expansive, Lux is saturated with Catholic iconography, with lyrics in no fewer than 13 languages, and circling themes of transcendence, suffering and grace.

When the Afrobeat sensation first saw Lemi Ghariokwu’s work, he said, ‘Wow!’ Then he plied him with marijuana and asked him to design his album sleeves. The artist recalls their extraordinary partnership – and the day Kuti’s Lagos HQ burned

‘There were flames everywhere. Soldiers with bayoneted rifles were dragging people out into the streets, staggering, naked and bleeding. Nobody knew if Fela was still inside the burning building.”

Lemi Ghariokwu pauses. For much of our video-call, the 70-year-old artist has joyfully revisited his years as friend and confidant of Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti, the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer whose legacy has been celebrated recently by both a high-profile podcast produced by the Obamas and a career-spanning box-set, The Best of the Black President, designed by Ghariokwu.

Songsmith’s comments come after his brother Liam stoked rumours Oasis had been courted for the role

Noel Gallagher has said that he would “absolutely” write the theme song for the next James Bond film if asked, saying that doing so would be an honour.

Speaking to TalkSport, the Oasis songwriter revealed that while there had not been any contact between himself and the producers of the franchise, he would leap at the opportunity to contribute music for the film, adding that he thought the theme songs the series was known for should be made by British artists.

Apple Music s’améliore en proposant dès maintenant la traduction de paroles en français pour les chansons. Il est bon de noter que c’est en cours de déploiement et que cela concerne seulement quelques titres dans l’immédiat. Image iGeneration La traduction française des paroles sur Apple Music est là Dans l’image ci-dessus, on peut voir qu’Apple […]

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L’article Apple Music se met à traduire les paroles en français est apparu en premier sur iPhoneAddict.fr.

The actor first realised what music was when he heard Yellow Submarine and knows a lot of Paul Simon lyrics, but what would he put on at a party?

The first song I fell in love with
My earliest memory is walking into a room at nursery school where they were playing Yellow Submarine by the Beatles. I was captivated by the sound effects, and Lennon shouting: “Full speed ahead!” When it got to the chorus, I remember thinking: “This must be music!”

The first single I bought
When I was eight, I won a competition at school to pick a new record to play at the mini disco we had on Fridays. My teacher took me to Woolworths, and I chose Come Back My Love by [50s revivalists] Darts. The first single I bought with my own pocket money was Mull of Kintyre by Wings from a record shop in Colne in Lancashire. It was No 1 at the time, and I chose it when my dad pointed out that it was by one of the Beatles.