From WQXR and Carnegie Hall comes Classical Music Happie Out, a new podcast hosted by me, pianist Maniacs. Each episode will speak with a special guest, listen to musical gems, play music-inspired games, and answer questions from our listeners. The first episode drops March 4th. Listen on the NPR app. A quick note before the show. This podcast contains explicit language. Happy Friday everyone from NPR Music. It's New Music Friday. I'm Steven Thompson here with Amelia Mason of WBUR in Boston. Welcome back to the show, Amelia. Thank you so much for having me back. This show is out on Friday, March 13th. As we head into Oscars weekend, Amelia, do you have any Oscars hot takes? Oh boy. I don't know. I don't know if I should speak on it. There were some movies I enjoyed a lot and other movies I enjoyed a lot less. All right. You know, this show is technically all about love, but give me your hate-related hot take. Okay. I really, really, really did not enjoy Frankenstein. I didn't like, visually speaking, I found it to be, it looked like a video game and just overwrought and- Overwrought is a pretty fair hit on that movie. It is overwrought and I think, you know, the original story is overwrought, which is one of the things I kind of disliked about the book, honestly. So you're just anti-Frankenstein, period. Maybe I just hate Frankenstein. What about you? Oh, I'm all about sinners. I'm not only, is Sinner's my favorite movie of the year, but I think it's going to win Best Picture. I think it might too. I think it's good. That's the hill I'm going to die on. We did a whole Pop Culture Happy Hour Oscars preview. If you go to the Pop Culture Happy Hour feed to hear that, and I'm like the one person who is like persistently, extremely optimistic that Sinner's is going to have this like massively huge night. I think it has an edge right now. It seems to be not exactly a front-runner, but like might have a bit of an edge, a little nose. I liked it very much. It wasn't my very favorite thing I saw, but I liked it a lot. I mean, it was truly original in many ways. Well, we have lots of Oscars coverage at npr.org. We also, in the All Songs feed earlier this week, Robin Hilton and I ranked the Best Original Song nominees and actually disagreed about which was the best, though we are both big fans of the top two. Let's get into this week's music. We're going to kick things off with Johnny Blue Skies and the Dark Clouds, aka Sturgill Simpson. Their new album is called Mutiny After Midnight. Sturgill Simpson, for those who are unfamiliar, is, I would describe him as sort of a country music, iconoclast. Kind of never really makes the same record twice. He's done psychedelic country, psychedelic soul, kind of zeezy, top-ish, synth rock, anime music, bluegrass albums, Americana, always all over the map. He's been playing around with kind of different sides of his persona and is actually here releasing his second album under the name Johnny Blue Skies. Now, in addition to all that musical iconoclasm I just described, this record is not being released digitally. He really wants you to buy, you know, kind of physical copies, hold it in your hands, and kind of sit down with it. And I think Amelia, this record, warrants that kind of attention. Yeah, I would agree. I was pleasantly, I don't want to say pleasantly surprised, well, I'm saying it, but that's not really what I mean. What I mean is I did not know what to expect exactly. You never know what to expect with Sturgill Simpson. I listened and I was like, heck yeah, this is good. But yeah, I was like surprised at how much country twang he managed to merge with funk and it made sense somehow. Yeah, I mean, musically speaking, this record really taps into this kind of hedonistic, boogieing country funk. But on top of that, and that only kind of scratches the surface of what we're getting here, this record also feels to me like an answer to the question, like who says there are no protest songs, right? There's been this kind of debate percolating that in this very tumultuous era, you don't have the same widely heard protest music kind of speaking to this moment in time. And this record definitely contains songs that I think qualify as protest songs, starting with the lead track, the title of which I will have to censor slightly, because this is NPR, but it's called Make America F again. And this song is a mouthful. I really love this song. It's extremely quotable too, right? Like it's referencing ketamine and antidepressants and again censoring, doing dark stuff in dark rooms, while also touching on kind of a sense of like national frustration in malaise. This is a guy with a lot of thoughts on a lot of things who does a lot of sitting around and musing. And the song feels like the product of someone who feels that way, not somebody who is just kind of checking issue boxes. Yeah, you don't feel like you're being lectured to, but you do feel a perspective. Like he's not both sizing it at the same time. He's like, no, things are f'd up to quote him. I mean, he didn't say that actually either. We're just going to keep cleaning up language, because the next song I wanted to talk about also swears. The closing track, Ain't That a B. Yeah, I feel like such a prude, not just saying these words. But you know, for nearly seven minutes, this song contains, I would say, some of his most pointed and maybe most didactic lyrics. You know, there's a line in the song, keep the peasants scraping by on minimum wages, lock up all the minorities, put their babies in cages. Anybody speak out, you simply dismiss them. Yeah. Like that is not opaque. That is not abstract. No. It's one of those things I find is, I think it's so hard in the protest song arena, where I've heard people write lyrics before that state very plainly what they think in a way that I find grating to the ear. I think it can, but he has a way of being straightforward and still being, I guess, original in his phrasing. He still surprises you. He's still, yes, the guy's got away with words. It's almost like he does this for a living. It reminds me a little, I was going to say Tracy Chapman some, like just some of the stuff that she writes is just so pointed and like they're talking about real issues and they have a political perspective, but they are still poetry. That is Johnny Blue Skies and the Dark Clouds, aka Sturgill Simpson. Their new album is called Mutiny After Midnight. Next up, new album by James Blake. James Blake's new album is called Trying Times. So, James Blake, UK singer, producer, he's worked with everyone, Kendrick Lamar, Beyonce, Bon Iver, Frank Ocean, certainly known for these kind of dreamy, electropop, Fantasia's, his own beautiful falsetto kind of woven through all of them, but he has such a great gift for collaboration. He turns up on a lot of people's records, a lot of people turn up on his records, and this record, which is the first that he's put out on his own label after a long run with the majors, has a really lovely mix of kind of dreaminess and forcefulness as he's kind of, you know, we heard the title, it's Trying Times, like Johnny Blue Skies, you know, he is weary about the state of the world as so many musicians and so many humans are, but he manages, I think, to kind of bring those two ideas together on this record. It is funny to talk about him immediately after Johnny Blue Skies, which I just think they take a very different approach to singing about politics. I do think it's more about the experience of living through these times personally, it's more interior in how it explores, it's like, you know, what are the psychic effects of watching the news? Yeah, I mean, take the title track, Trying Times, it's not like these times are trying, it is about we are trying to survive in our relationship through these trying times with the backdrop of feeling this kind of sense of dread about the state of the world. I feel like sonically this album is reflected feels like right now it's sort of fragmented and unreal and sometimes it's dreamy and other times it has this like anxiety to it. I mean, it's very James Blake. Sometimes I'm listening, I'm like, oh God, like that. But then you remember like he's the reason music sounds like this. You listed his many collaborators and I think his fingerprints are all over pop music now. It's easy to forget how original his ideas are. Absolutely. His ideas are not only all over pop music, but all over R&B, all over hip hop. You know, he has managed to kind of straddle these different genres, kind of always there to use his voice as needed as kind of his most haunting instrument. And that's something that really comes through throughout this record. I wanted to shout out the song doesn't just happen featuring the rapper Dave. Dave put out one of the best records of last year and here this just kind of continues that winning streak. You know, he really kind of, James Blake kind of turns this song over to Dave who raps about like trying to be a good person in unethical systems. And I think that pairing of sensibilities, the pairing of those two guys and the ideas that they bring to music, I think works really well. Yeah. If being a good man was easy, I still be me. Cause I do shit the hard way. Don't know who's who. My girlfriend hates me deep down. Maybe I do too. We used to jack niggas in the morning cause most men didn't have cash when work's done. This type of dinner, have your jawline finna. Man gonna think you had work done. See a man maintaining. See a man waiting on. See a man complaining. I give a one order. I don't need restraining. None of this shit came easy. Man put my name on a wall. Only right, you need to throw money at it. I also really love death of love. It's tying a lot of these ideas together. You know, the death of love can mean so many things. And I think I know what he's, he's pointing at sort of like the death of love in society, but it is an elegant way, I think, to address some of these ideas and the way that the song feels. I don't know. It's almost at, at odds with the lyrics. Gives you this hopeful feeling even though the words are, you know, a little more ambivalent. And I enjoy the complexity of that. James Blake, his new album is called Trying Times. We've got some more records we're going to talk about in depth, but first let's take a quick break. From NPR Music, it's New Music Friday. I'm Stephen Thompson here with Amelia Mason of WBUR in Boston. Amelia, tell me what's going on at the station. Well, just the use, the news. Now, we're, we're a member station, an NPR member station in Boston, one of two. And I cover arts and culture, which includes music. And I guess the, the thing that's coming up now that I'm really excited about is sort of following on the heels of NPR's Tiny Desk Contest. WBUR for many years, aka me, has put together our own little panel of local musicians and writers and listened through the Massachusetts entries to your contest. And we choose WBUR's favorite entry, favorite local entry. And it's very fun because we listen to, I mean, I think there's often around like 200 submissions from our state. And it has yielded some amazing discoveries, one of which the very first year we did it years ago was Ann Jimily, who we are about to talk about, who has a record coming out and has done really well for himself. I feel very proud that we had a chance to cover him back in the day. Yeah, back in the day being 2018. And then, and Jimily's been entering the Tiny Desk Contest, first entered in 2015, which gives you a sense, A, of how long the Tiny Desk Contest has been going. And B, one of the things that I think is so lovely about the Tiny Desk Contest is it's not just about the winner. You get this huge body of submissions. We usually get five, six, seven, thousand entries. They're generally posted to YouTube and you can find your favorite artist, whether that artist actually wins or is like profiled on top shelf or, you know, whether it's a big part of the contest or not. And Tiny Desk Contest entries have gone viral independently of the Tiny Desk Contest itself. And I just think that's so cool. And one of the other things that I love, which we're about to talk about, is when an artist enters the contest and years later kind of makes it on their own, like the Tiny Desk Contest still got to be a tiny piece of their story as it was in the case of our next artist and Jimily, their new album is called You're Free to Go. Did you heal me by the river? Should you call me when you need me? I'll deliver If that's enough, that's enough, that's enough, that's enough, why? Did I begin, I begin, I begin to cry So, and Jimily is a singer-songwriter originally from Texas. Got his start up here in Boston. We got to claim him for a while and now he's in Durham, North Carolina, still putting out great music. I love Angemily. I've been a fan for a long time. It's been really amazing to watch him develop. I think he has a really distinctive lyrical style and an incredible ear for melody, which just always comes through for me. Absolutely, like those raw materials have been there from the beginning, but are continuing to be refined from record to record. You know, it's interesting, Amelia, when we were talking about Johnny Blue Skies, aka Sturgill Simpson, you made a reference to Tracy Chapman and kind of the attention to detail in the songwriting. Here, the comparisons to Tracy Chapman are not only in the detail of the songwriting, but also in this kind of dusky, distinctive voice. You know, I think Angemily from the beginning has drawn a lot of comparisons to Sufjan Stevens as well. And I think that comes through as well. I mean, you know, it's song like Turning Away, which is setting Angemily's kind of feathery, mysterious voice against these kind of delicate, curly cues of guitar. You really get a sense of ornateness and care and craft that, for me, certainly conjures up those Sufjan Stevens comparisons, but really, Angemily is his own artist. First, we talked about Sufjan Stevens and how he loves Sufjan's music, but as time has gone on, he's found his own way. I think you can hear the commonalities, but now there's an angibily kind of flavor to the melodies that he's writing and the accompaniment and the guitar. He has a taste for kind of like, he'll go off in weird directions melodically or he'll do a weird time signature or something, and it's maybe more complex than you realize at first. And writes these sort of quietly devastating songs. He's been open about what this album addresses, some of which is like, so he's trans and his estrangement from his mother is something he's talked about pretty frankly in interviews in the press for this, and there are definitely songs that could be about that, just really like full of pathos and anger, but like sort of wrapped in these like gorgeous melodies and arrangements. I mean, you want to talk about anger and gorgeousness, take the song point of view, which is a minute, 22 seconds long, very Sufjani, and it's kind of arrangements, all these like kind of plucked and bowed strings, full song and miniature, but like at the end of the song, there is just this kind of bracing and profane, angry closing line. I also really love the song Waits For Me, which is very much, I think about sort of N'jemile's experience being trans, and it's quite lovely, these lines, when I was a little girl, I wanted to be free, I wanted to be all of the things my mother wanted me to be, and then by the end, it's, he kind of writes it differently, when I was a little boy, I wanted to be real, I wanted to be all of the things my body wanted me to feel. It's just so succinct and elegant and deeply felt, I think you can guess what it's about, but it could mean so many things at the same time. That is N'jemile, his new album is called Your Free To Go. Next up, Kim Gordon has a new record, it is called Play Me. So Kim Gordon, famous as one of the main members of the long running great art rock giant Sonic Youth, went solo a number of years back, kind of following her divorce from Thirst and More, who was also one of the main voices in Sonic Youth, and since then, Kim Gordon, she's written memoirs, and she's put out these solo records that find her kind of expanding on and extending and finding her own solo voice outside of Sonic Youth, and they definitely feel in some ways of a piece with Sonic Youth's records, but they are definitely their own very distinct excursions into hip hop, into spoken word, into kind of strange, grinding art songs, like No Hands, which kind of warps and breaks her voice into shards. This album, the production was very cool. I'm not sure, I always thought it worked with her voice. I think it worked best in the songs that were more rock-oriented in their sound, like I was confused hearing her over hip hop beat, frankly, even if it was a cool bit of production, but like Girl With A Look, I think worked. I think there's something good, especially when she pushes her voice up into like more of its upper range, and she's restraining a little bit more, and it gives it this urgency. Yeah, that's a more straight ahead kind of post-punk song that isn't quite as experimental, and kind of in that same vein, the song Not Today, feels like kind of like an indie rock art song, right? Kind of you get more shimmery guitars, the beats feel a little more organic, she's singing more than speaking. I hear that song, and I think that would have been a pretty gnarly, awesome Sonic Youth song. You know, when I was reading up on it and reading more from like the press materials, essentially, that come with this, and I learned some things that definitely made some of the songs more interesting. I know one of them, she's quoting Spotify playlist titles. Like she's very smart, she has these like cool ideas, you know, in the lyrics, and how she's sort of commenting on the modern era and politics, she's just reflecting it back at us in a kind of warped, fun house mirror, you know? Yeah, I mean, you take a song like Bye Bye 25, you know, which is just kind of a list of provocative phrases set against this effect that sounds like you didn't fasten your seatbelt. Yeah. And that's just such a, that's such an odd, arty, kind of strange, challenging way, you know, to kind of close out this record. That is Kim Gordon. Her new album is called Play Me. We've got one more record we're going to talk about in depth as well as a lightning round of some of our other favorite records out today, March 13th. But first, let's take a quick break. Listen to musical gems, play music inspired games, and answer questions from our listeners. The first episode drops March 4th. Listen on the NPR app. From NPR Music, it's New Music Friday. I'm Stephen Thompson here with Amelia Mason from WBUR in Boston. Before we get to our lightning round, we've got one more record we wanted to talk about, Blessing Jolie. Blessing Jolie's new album is called Twenty Nothing. So good. Blessing Jolie is a singer-songwriter from Texas and she's new to the scene and she's great. That's what I got. That's all you need to know. I mean, truly, this is her first album or mixtape or I'm not sure what they're calling it in extended play. It definitely has a feel of a little bit of like a kind of EP. Like we're trying a lot of things, which I really love about it. It's playful and inventive and it's incredible. I love this album. Yeah, I mean, she's really, like many kind of Gen Z artists who kind of came up in the YouTube era, she has this real ability to just kind of skid across genres without ever really bothering to land on one in particular. She mixes kind of indie folk and R&B. You get these strands of hip hop coming through. With songs about, God, the state of the world from the perspective of a young person who's, she's singing about streaming services and kind of the pull between music and day jobs. Also, life is a Nigerian-American who's kind of straddling the expectations of her family and her own desires as somebody who has really dreamed for a long time of making music. This record is really meant to kind of chronicle her youth and kind of coming into who she is as a musician. Yeah, she's got this one song, Software Developer. She's like, it could have been one hell of a Software Developer. Like it's all about wanting to play music, but it's with this very rye kind of self-deprecating way about it. She reminds me a little bit of Olivia Rodrigo sometimes in her lyricism or the sound. I actually think there's a whole crop of female singer-songwriters, some of them very famous, who write really well with this kind of self-deprecating rye tone, but she has her own way into it. There are times where this album really, I feel like, is very influenced by rap and hip hop in her lyricism. Just how dense it is, how many references there are, how many kind of internal rhymes and word plays going on. It's amazing. Yeah, I mean you take regular, schmegular girl, which is kind of, it feels a little bit like old school hip hop, like inspired by almost like 80s and 90s hip hop, but kind of in the choruses, it goes full-on rap rock, you know, complete with record scratches. Yeah, she references Limp Bizkit in her like. Yeah, and I mean Olivia Rodrigo, I mean Olivia Rodrigo references a lot of other people's music, but I don't see her going that far. No. Girl, beggin' her itch type type girl, girl, beggin' her itch type girl, beggin' her itch type girl, girl, beggin' her itch type girl, look at me, this is the trilogy, I'm finally feeling me here. The other thing about Blessing Julie is just her, again, her melodic sense. This is something I'll owe it, I'm very partial to, you'll hear me sing it with any artist I like. I was going back and looking at some of her lyrics for her in the opening track on this, 20 teens, I was reading lyrics and I could hear the melody immediately because that's how sticky it is. Like it was in there instantly and that is hard to do. That is really hard to do and the fact that she has that, I mean, we say innate gifts, she has talked very openly about working on the craft of music. Yeah, feeling like she didn't have innate gifts, which it seems crazy to me. No, but I mean, I think that's such an important thing to remind people and such a great thing for her to be talking about is musicians do not just come out, they don't just form in the ether and emerge fully formed, they have to work on their craft and if you love music and you try writing your own song and playing your own song and you've never done it before, it's probably going to be hot garbage. Like music is a craft and a skill, like anything else and having a point of view is a craft and a skill. You don't just emerge with a point of view, you have to have lived experiences and I really love the way this record, one of the things that we were talking about with Sturgill Simpson up at the top of the segment is if you're a singer, songwriter, you want to be quotable. Like you want to be like saying things in a way that other people aren't saying them and having a point of view that is really specific to you but accessible beyond you and that's something I think she does so well throughout this record. Yeah, I mean you took the words right out of my mouth because that's what I was going to bring up, although in a slightly different way, which is when you're talking about musicians having to hone their craft and practice a lot and be bad for a while and make mistakes to get better, I do think one of the things that you can't always teach or that is maybe undervalued is the point of view. It's that having something to say and figuring out how to say it and also having your own taste and knowing what you like. So you might not be able to strum a guitar yet but if you know what you like and you have something to say and you think you know how you might want to say it, that's going to serve you really, really well once you've figured out how to play music. I'm excited to hear more from her. She's kind of talked about this record as like a snapshot of a time in her life where she's kind of moved beyond some of these songs. I can't wait to hear where she goes next. I think she's really exciting. That is blessing Jolie, her new album or mixtape or whatever we want to call it is called 20 Nothing. Now, Amelia, we could not possibly get to every great record out today, March 13th and we've kind of taken to throwing this segment open to some of the other members of the NPR music team. But I do want to shout out one record before I ask you for your lightning round pick. I want to talk about the singer-songwriter Morgan Nagler. Her songs have this kind of low rumbling menacing quality to them but her voice also works as kind of a leavening agent. Listening to songs like Cradle the Pain, you get a lot of what I love about bands like Wednesday, you know, The Heaviness, The Twang, The Attention to Lyrical Detail, but she's been around a lot longer. She came up alongside members of Rilo Kiley, she's made records with the band Whisper Town, she even co-wrote Kyoto with Phoebe Bridgers, one of the freaking best songs of the last decade. Now, Morgan Nagler has a fantastic new solo album with a perfect title. It's called I've Got Nothing to Lose and I'm Losing It. So Tanarowen is a collective of Tuareg musicians. They're from the desert in the Sahara, so Southern Algeria, Northern Mali. The music they play kind of combines the sounds of rock music and then African music from that area. They've been around for decades and decades. They, I mean, they're very political. You can really go down a rabbit hole on this band. They have an incredible story. You know, they just keep putting out freaking great music and it is, this album is just so groovy. Like it always is. There's some new voices in it. They've brought in some younger musicians that join them and if you haven't heard them before, you really got to check them out. Tanarowen's new album is called Hugar. All right. Up next, I'm going to throw it to my dear, wonderful colleague, Felix Contreras, co-host of NPR's Alt Latino. Vocalist and songwriter, Jorge Drexler, is a big deal in Latin America and he's probably the best known musician from the small Southern Latin American country of Uruguay, which is nestled between Argentina and Brazil. The thing about Jorge Drexler, he's been incredibly popular in the Spanish-speaking world and it's largely because he's created a sound that is uniquely his with just traces of his native Uruguay. But for his latest album, Takara, for the first time, he leans heavily into the 18th century Afro-Uruguayan tradition of Kandome, which is having a resurgence in his home country these days. His trademark, magically literate lyrics, bounce among the polyrhythms, always on a slow but intense burn. He is one of the most awarded Latin Grammy artists out there and I imagine he'll be adding a few more for this album, Takara by Jorge Drexler. Check it out. Let's turn things over to our classical music correspondent, Tom Heisinger. The album I'm really thrilled about this week comes from the fabulous choral group from England called the Talis Scholars. They are singing music by American composer, Nico Muley, who was a choir boy in his youth and he really loves the old-school intricate blending and layering and building up of sound, like music from the high Renaissance. And we'll hear this little snippet of No Resting Place, where Muley does something pretty extraordinary, I think. At the end of the Latin text, he adds quotes in English from a group of immigrants, even though they were legally living in the UK, they were suddenly denied benefits and some were even deported. So you'll hear the choir sing, I don't feel at home anymore. That's the Talis Scholars singing music by Nico Muley, No Resting Place. And finally, the fantastic, striking Viking himself, Lars Gottrich. Hey, y'all, this one actually surprised, dropped last Friday, but it's such a big deal that we had to include it in this lightning round. A new Fugazi record. Okay, not actually a new Fugazi record, but one that's been bootlegged for decades. Here's some story. In the fall of 1992, the DC punk band went into Steve Albini's basement and made an entire album's worth of songs, basically all of In on the Killtaker. Steve Albini, this is the guy who made Jesus Lizard's early records sound so loud and wild, but both Fugazi and Steve Albini decided not to release these recordings. And now 34 years later, we finally get an official release. These sessions are raw and aggressive. It's the rough draft of a pivotal album, an alternate universe where they're placed at the center of an emotional explosion. That's Albini Sessions by Fugazi, right now only available on Bandcamp. And that is our show for this week. Thank you, Amelia Mason, for taking time out of your week at WBUR in Boston. Thank you so much for having me. It was a real pleasure. It is always a pleasure to have you on, Amelia. Thank you for being here. If you enjoyed this week's show, we always appreciate a positive review on Apple or Spotify or whatever app you're listening to right now. This episode was produced by Noah Caldwell in Elmanyan and edited by Otis Hart. Our production assistant is Dora Levitt. The executive producer of NPR Music is Serea Mohamed. Hazel Sills will be back next week. I will be off because of the Oscars to discuss new music with Francesca Harding of KCRW in Los Angeles. Until then, take a moment to be well, get yourself to the nearest sunshine, and treat yourself to lots of great music. From WQXR and Carnegie Hall comes classical music happy hour, a new podcast hosted by me, pianist Maniacs. Each episode will speak with a special guest, listen to musical gems, play music inspired games, and answer questions from our listeners. The first episode drops March 4th. Listen on the NPR app.
