Tracey Thorn has one of the most beautiful voices in pop. She sings with Everything But The Girl less frequently these days, and with an even more evocative sound than before. But the sudden appearance of 2023’s album Fuse was worth the wait. The band left their jazzy, acoustic beginnings to experiment a little more with electronics in the 1990s, and that continues on Fuse. A number of the tracks deal with doubts and insecurities, and one in particular brings this idea to the fore: “When You Mess Up.” Thorn’s voice and a piano introduce the track, the voice determined and definite: You seem ..read more

The moment “So Sick Of Dreaming” starts, it whisks me back to a warm-coloured, fuzzy-photographed version of the 70s. The dreamy electric guitar, slightly washed with a chorus effect, pairs with Maggie’s close, clear, dry vocals to make the song feel like an old classic. And if that wasn’t classic enough… well, this song is about a break-up. The guy in the song has obviously gone beyond the “point of no return” with their relationship. Rogers gets specific about him going to a Knicks game instead of meeting her at the restaurant they’d booked. As the chorus tells us, she’s sick of dreaming ab ..read more

Being a full-time career musician is not easy – but it is doable. Before, you had to rely on a label, a manager, a booking agent, and a whole team of people to thrust you into the spotlight. This meant you were heavily dependent on what other people could do for you. Now, between the internet and the gig economy, there are more options than ever for you as a musician to earn money. The first step in this journey is you need to build stronger relationships with the fans you already have and if you don’t have a lot of fans you need to work on getting a core group of them into your world. 1. Live ..read more

I’m no theologian, but it seems to me the title character of Kacey Musgraves’s “The Architect” is probably God… The name Architect is not too far off from Creator. This song approaches the world as a work of art, and reaches out for the artist’s hand. Musgraves hides complexity in simple questions. She begins with an apple. Its “perfect design” is what prompts her first request to “speak to the architect.” She calls it “sweet and divine,” linking it with God and placing it in her mouth – to know that it’s sweet, she must have tasted it. This gets interesting when we remember that the for ..read more

The power that music has to move you is phenomenal. It seems to physically make a part of your brain go from one place to another – in this case happy to melancholy, simple acceptance to complicated doubt, light to shade, sun to clouds. That’s what Jason Wozniak’s “It’s All The Same” does to me. The squeak of a chair, or perhaps Wozniak himself picking up a plectrum, introduces the track, like indistinct creaking just before the start of something. Suddenly someone starts the strong picking of the song’s few chords, and Wozniak’s pure vocals join in after a pass. Alyssa Kinn starts to harmoni ..read more

Well, I spent the whole of last week underwater On occasion, I would surface from my room Got a first-class view from right here in my fortress Got a staring contest going with the moon Holly Humberstone’s “Easy Tiger” is not lacking in slow, deliberate destitution. The song begins with the kind of sadness that settles like humidity over a whole house, seeping into every room and dampening each surface. It turns kitchen chairs into funeral pews and vases into urns. Even the music itself is thickened by it, right from the get-go – a lonely guitar is saturated with a chorus effect, and Humber ..read more

Elbow (and lead singer Guy Garvey particularly) are a sort of underground national treasure in the United Kingdom. They play shows for royalty, but they appear to be the kind of band you’d want to spend the afternoon in the pub with. Garvey himself presents a popular and very enjoyable regular radio show. But his real day job is as Elbow’s lead singer and songwriter. And with “Balu” they have put to bed their delicate and luscious previous album with a furious and groove-filled giant of a track which talks about… what? I had an initial fanciful idea that it could be about a pet, in the traditi ..read more

Every now and then I hear an artist who registers a 9.9 on the Wow! Meter – and Nashville’s Jaryn Jones is the newest to make the club. (Jaryn is pronounced like “Aaron” with a J, by the way.) Her music meshes the breathtaking beauty of great composers like Stephen Sondheim and Alan Menken with the pop-Broadway echoes of Sara Bareilles. Plus her voice is hypnotic, filled with qualities that bring to mind songs in movies like Aladdin and Pocahontas. The elegance and sophistication of Jones’ music provide a much-needed counterbalance to many of today’s catchy-but-discardable pop offerings. Some ..read more

One of the well-documented wonders of Fleetwood Mac’s seminal album Rumours is how all the members of the band managed to devote themselves to making the best music they possibly could whilst simultaneously ripping each other apart emotionally. Some of the songs on the album understandably have bitter, heartbroken, or regret-laden lyrical content. But one member of the band seemed to consistently cut through the heartache and make young lovers everywhere feel excited to be alive. That person, Fleetwood Mac’s secret weapon, is Christine McVie. Time and again throughout the band’s history, McVie ..read more

There’s a nice picked acoustic guitar. There’s the passing slide of an electric. And then there’s the most beautiful, resonant voice singing about porch swings and backyards. This is “Mudroom” by Tiny Habits. They are Maya Rae, Cinya Khan, and Judah Mayowa and they all sing a verse on this thrilling and meditative new song. But more than that, their equally beautiful (and dreamily similar) voices pick careful moments to harmonize with one another. There’s a lazy, hazy feel to the song that is quite addictive. All the instrumentation is muted to the essence of what is needed to let those ..read more