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type-a-nomad · 7 years

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ah, to be young. Alternative Title: sometimes I’m a little crazy but only when there are no consequences whatsoever.

It’s March 23 and I don’t understand how the world is turning so fast that the days are just spinning by. The thing that’s really drawing my attention to the days passing is that Tim is leaving very soon. For me, he is kind of the person that sets the energy for this place. He has been here longer than almost anyone and it shows. He works as a kind of center for people. A role model. An example of the kind of person who volunteers at SAVE. He was supposed to leave in a couple weeks, but things changed a bit and he decided to leave early to go visit friends in Germany on his way home. It’s going to be a very sad goodbye, especially because the end of his stay here came as a bit of a surprise. In terms of interesting things that have happened in the last few days, there haven't been that many. We have had a lot of issues here with protests and riots in the townships that shut down our projects because it’s either too dangerous for us to be there or too dangerous to get the kids in and out. It means I’ve had a lot of free time because project has been cancelled for two days already and could possibly be continued next week if the pattern of rioting continues. Generally, what happens is there is a protest because of lack of resources and lack of understanding between the government and the people in the township. Then, during the riots, people drink a lot. The next day everyone is still drunk and the destruction continues. The following day there are no protests, but the day after people start drinking again and the whole thing repeats itself.

One thing I’m very tired of here is drama and gossip. I’m in house 22 and it is getting so bad and generally stressful for me that I want to ask to be moved just so i don't have to think about that energy anymore. The current issue has to do with Danni (again). Basically, she was drunk on a beach and got in a fight with another drunk girl who went and told Robyn and Shannon that she feels threatened and now it’s a whole drama and Danni wants to leave the program and is a perpetually dangerous move. She’s honestly a bully and it scares me to deal with her because she has no problem being mean to people. Usually, bullies root their anger in their own insecurities and lash out at people because it makes them feel better about themselves. Danni isn't this way. She’s confident and sure of herself and doesn’t attack people for no reason, she just is amazingly aggressive if you push her buttons. And, she has a lot of buttons. She has very long toes, they’re easy to step on. I’m scared of her, especially because a lot of my friends live in Dunbar and she has been obviously irritated and cold to me since I’ve been hanging out with her “group” less and less. I have no problem standing up for other people’s rights and morals, but when it comes to person situations for me, I avoid confrontation at all costs. Confrontation stresses me out and, even if the person in question doesn’t actually matter to me in any other situation, my brain has a real problem with thinking that people are upset with me. I am tired of this feeling like middle school and I have an entire 3 weeks left, so I am just going to walk over to reception and say my problem and hopefully they transfer me (fingers crossed super hard). The people I actually like are at Dunbar anyways. The only downside to Dunbar is that the wifi is horrible, but who cares. I didn't come to Africa for good wifi. Excluding that negative energy, I had a really really nice weekend. I spent most of my time eating and dancing. On Friday, I went to Big Bay and sat around on the beach with a smoothie with my friends. The water was absolutely freezing and I loved it. That night, we went out dancing and I had a fantastic time. One thing I notice whenever I’m in public and music is playing is how obnoxiously bad pop music has become. On one hand, there’s a brilliance to it. People have found a formula that you can follow perfectly and get your song on the radio. Further, they’re figured out that people don’t mind if all of your songs sound the same and only have about 20 repeating lyrics in them. On the other hand, I have to listen to the shît these people are making and it drives me crazy. The pop music industry rakes in millions of dollars a year. There are actually talented artists that this money could be going to who give a shît about their composition and hooks and time signature and have actually done their research and turned on their brain before stepping up to a microphone. In my eyes, it’s incredibly insulting that people listen to Selena Gomez or over people who make their own beats and have original thoughts that they then turn into music that actually sounds good and complex, even if you don’t understand the lyrics (e.g. Shoos Off, Kyle Bent, the Roots, Bleachers, Soccer Mommy, Mos Def, Samuel Larson, M.I.A, Abhi the Nomad, BROCKHAMPTON, just to name a few). That being said, I can dance to anything that remotely resembles “music” if I really want to. After we all got back, I sat with my friend Lucy in the kitchen drinking tea until 5am. I felt like such a *youth*. We talked about life and why we came to South Africa. I think I came here to travel and do good, but mainly to isolate myself from the familiar. I wanted to see if I could find calm within myself and balance that with the ambition I already access easily. It’s easy to feel calm and satisfied with where you are and stay there. It’s hard to stay calm while still learning and improving. That was the goal. I think, with every day that passes, I get closer to realizing that goal. I am becoming more sure of myself and my capabilities. Further, my values are clarifying. I am passionate about fighting for people who are in situations that make it very hard for them to have a voice. That is to say, if you are poor African-American in Oakland, being an activist and arguing with people about causes like Black Lives Matter is most likely not the first on your list of priorities. Safety and security are first. If you feel like even law enforcement is a threat to you, why the hell would you have time to try and improve that situation— you’re just looking to survive it. I think it’s too much to ask those people who are focusing on survival to try and make their general situation better on top of fighting their personal battle, whether emotional or physical, every day. There are incredible people out there who are doing both, and that blows my mind. Moreover, because I don’t have to go through a situation with that intensity, I think there is a certain responsibility that comes with, entirely by chance, being born into a situation as comfortable as mine. That responsibility is to fight for and help those who were, entirely by chance, born into a less comfortable situation. I will fight tooth and nail for those people. I feel deeply that it’s my duty, because my own shît is generally taken care of. I get to go to University and study something I love. I feel comfortable calling 911 for help. I get to marry somebody I love without worrying about the legal and social consequences. I can kiss my boyfriend in public without others being offended and grossed out by my display of affection. I don’t have to think about my race and how it affects my life. I can open my fridge and choose something I want to eat from multiple options of food. This brings me to another point: the privilege of diversity. Until I started living alone, I didn't realize how luxurious variety is. To have enough wiggle room in your life that you can do different things every weekend or night. To have enough wiggle room in your bank account that you can buy two different kinds of bread and cereals at the supermarket without worrying about wasting food I can’t afford to. When I live on my own, I eat the same thing for breakfast every day. When I go back home to Berkeley, I get to choose whether I want granola or Honey Nut Cheerios, and that blows my mind. When I go back home, Honey Nut Cheerios encapsulate luxury for me, and that’s not something I will ever fail to appreciate ever again. On Saturday, I was functioning on 3 hours of sleep and my body went into full survival mode. It was brilliant because I felt 100% fine, sort of how people who are about to die supposedly feel right after a car crash. Like I had a pole shoved through my abdomen, but was walking around and saying that everything is peachy keen, because it felt that way. I was invited by my new friends Leis and Tanya (both super cool girls who live at Dunbar, unfortunately Leis leaves at the end of the week) to go to the Old Biscuit Mill. Because I felt totally fine, I pulled on some clothes and went. I had the best steak sandwich of my entire life and it was fantastic. Even though it was 11am and I had gotten no sleep, I still got my favorite watermelon mojito. To justify this to myself I kept in mind that they put very little alcohol in it, it’s my favorite drink in the whole world, and it’s only sold on Saturdays (when the Mill is open) in Cape Town, South Africa. Might as well capitalize on the opportunity. After a few hours the other girls were super tired, even though I felt great, we decided it was time to go home. Before we called the uber to go back, I asked if we could stop in this artsy jewelry shop that looked really cool. When we were poking around in the store, we noticed they did piercings there. I asked if I could get some new piercings, but the woman who was working at the register said she needed to get her boss to com in for that and that would take at least an hour and a half. Now that I was in the piercing mindset, I turned to my friends and told them about a piercing studio in the city center that I had heard about. For some reason, this really appealed to a group of absolutely exhausted 20-year-old women. We got into the uber and went straight there.

Today, was Sunday. I hiked a mountain up to a cave on the other side of Table Mountain called Elephant’s Eye. It overlooks the Cape Flats, which is gang land and the crime and murder rates are off of the charts. It was absolutely gorgeous. The walk up and down were a bit treacherous because it is way less popular than other tourist-y hiking spots, so it’s not as well groomed and the rocks have sand everywhere around them so everything is very slippery. After the hike, I went into Muizenberg, which is like the cool surfer cousin in the family of the Cape Flats. I had an amazing burger with lots of cheese on it, fries, and a chai latte. After I had fully started my food coma, I took an uber home and started writing exactly what you’re reading now. For dinner, I went over to Dunbar to get takeout with my friends because I’m super exhausted from the bad vibes in house 22. It’s to the point where I genuinely don’t want Danni to be in the room when I get home.

While I was hanging out at Dunbar, Tim turned to me and said “I have some bad news”. Immediately I panicked, because the last time he had “bad news” he told me he was leaving over a month earlier than expected. Also, whenever there is “bad news”, I get a feeling that I’m about to get in trouble. I get kinda nervous and say “alright what’s up”, and then he has the NERVE to say “I’ll tell you later”. I’m sorry EXCUSE ME?? Why the hell would you tell me that I don’t get to hear bad news NOW. I was irritated to say the least. I might do yoga, but patience still is not a particularly strong aspect of my personality. When he finally tells me, it turns out he was messing with me the entire time. The news was that he extended his flight and is now leaving on April 9th (my baby sister’s birthday!!!!). This was the best thing that I had heard all day and I did a happy dance for several minutes. Things are getting complex here, but I think that’s natural when you start living somewhere— the more you engage the more details and complicated things get. I can handle it.

things I need to work on:

not eating so poorly ALL THE TIME. I really need to teach myself that ramen and grilled cheese is not sufficient for breakfast and lunch. learn more kids’ names. plan a road trip get back to doing yoga every morning and just getting more exercise in general.

things i’ve been doing well:

enjoying life here going to the beach lots creating space in my mind. planning for university and this summer when I have time

- Q

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adolfo85r9722397-blog · 5 years

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kostikivanov · 7 years

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St. Vincent’s Cheeky, Sexy Rock

Annie Clark, the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist known as St. Vincent, has an apartment in the East Village. She’s rented it since 2009. But last winter and spring, while she was in town recording a new album, she didn’t stay there. If she wanted something, she sent someone to get it. “I need to not have to worry about the plumbing and the vermin,” she said. “Also, the trinkets and indicators of my actual life.” She was immersed instead in the filtration of that actual life into song. She was in a hermetic phase: celibate, solitary, sober. “My monastic fantastic,” she called it. A stomach bug in March left her unable to stand even the smell of alcohol, and, anyway, there were so many things she wanted to get done that she didn’t have the time to be hungover. She abstained from listening to music, except her own, in order to keep her ears clear.

She was staying at the Marlton Hotel, in Greenwich Village, a block away from Electric Lady Studios, one of the places where she was making the record. Most days, she got up at sunrise, took a Pilates class, and then headed to Electric Lady, to work past sundown. She had dinner in the studio, or else alone at a nearby restaurant, or in her room. A book or an episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and then early to bed. Not exactly “Hammer of the Gods.”

It had been more than three years since the release of her last album, which she’d named “St. Vincent,” as though it were her first under that name, rather than her fourth—or fifth, if you include one she made with David Byrne, in 2012. All these were well regarded, and with each her reputation and following grew. The music was singular, dense, modern, yet catchy and at times soulful, in an odd kind of way.

Still, the self-titled album was widely considered to be a breakthrough, a consummation of sensibility and talent, a fulfillment of the St. Vincent conceit—this somewhat severe performer who was both her and not her. The act was a blend of rock-goddess bloodletting and arch performance art, self-expression and concealment. (She says that she got the name from a reference, in a Nick Cave song, to the Greenwich Village hospital where Dylan Thomas died.) The ensuing tour was called “Digital Witness,” named for a creepy/peppy song on the album about our culture of surveillance and oversharing. Her life was a whirlwind. There was a Grammy, some best-album acclaim and time on the charts, and a binge of attention from the music and fashion press, and, eventually, from the gossip industrial complex, too, when she began a relationship with the British actress and supermodel Cara Delevingne. The Daily Mail, struggling to take the measure of this American shape-shifting indie rocker, called Clark “the female Bowie.” (The paper’s stringers doorstepped Clark’s family.) When that romance came to an end, after more than a year, she began to be photographed with Kristen Stewart, another object of fan and media obsession, and so the St. Vincent project took on a new dimension: clickbait, gossip fodder. This bifurcation, as Clark called the split between her public life as an artist and the new one as a tabloid cartoon, was disorienting to her, and even sad. But there was a way to put it all to work: write more songs. Clark, quoting her friend and collaborator Annie-B Parson, the choreographer, told me one day, “The best performers are those who have a secret.”

For the new album—it comes out this fall, although Clark has not yet publicly revealed its name—she hooked up with the producer Jack Antonoff, who, in addition to performing his own music, under the name Bleachers, has co-written and produced records for Taylor Swift and Lorde. This has led people to suppose that Clark is plotting a grab for pop success. In June, she released a single called “New York,” and on the evidence the supposition seems fair. It is—by her standards, anyway—a fairly straight-ahead piano ballad, lamenting lost love, or absence of a kind. “You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can handle me,” she sings. Fans immediately began speculating that it was about Delevingne, or, if you thought about it differently, David Bowie, who died last year. “It’s a composite,” Clark told me, though of whom she wouldn’t say. She objects to the idea that songs should automatically be interpreted as diaristic, especially when the songwriter is a woman. “That’s just a sexist thing,” she said. “ ‘Women do emotions but are incapable of rational thought.’ ”

A few weeks before the release she told me, “It’s rare that you get to say ‘This song could be someone’s favorite.’ But this might be the one. Twenty years of writing songs, and I’ve never had that feeling.” It was May, at Electric Lady. She was in the studio with Antonoff. “We’re doing the flavor-crystally bits,” Clark said. This essentially meant adding or removing pieces of sound to or from the sonic stew they’d spent months concocting. “There’s a lot of information on this album,” she said.

Clark, who is thirty-four, was sitting cross-legged on a couch. She had on studded leather loafers, a suit jacket, and black leggings with bones printed on them, in the manner of a Halloween skeleton costume. Her hair was black and cut in a bob. (In the past, she has dyed it blond, lavender, or gray, and has been in and out of curls, its natural state.) She wasn’t wearing much makeup. When she performs, she puts on the war paint, and usually goes in for fanciful costumes and serious heels. For the “Digital Witness” tour, she wore a tight, perforated fake-leather jumpsuit with a plunging neckline, and smeared lipstick. Last year, she did a show while attired in a purple foam toilet. Parson, who is responsible for the rigid postmodern dance moves that Clark has embraced in recent years, referred to her aspect as “wintry,” which doesn’t quite encompass her tendency to throw herself around the stage or dive off it to surf the crowd.

Now she seemed slight, fine-boned, almost translucent—it was hard to imagine her surviving a sea of forearms, iPhones, and gropey hands. She has a sharp jawline, a few freckles, and great big green eyes, which can project a range of seasons. She thinks before she speaks, asks a lot of questions, and has a burly laugh.

On a coffee table in front of her were a Chanel purse and containers of goji berries, trail mix, and raw-almond macaroons. She stood occasionally, to play slashing, tinny lines on an unamplified electric guitar of her own design—a red Ernie Ball Music Man, from her signature line, that retails for upward of fifteen hundred dollars—which, on playback, sounded thick and throbby.

She shreds on electric guitar, but not in a wanky way. It often doesn’t sound like a guitar at all. Her widely cited forebears are Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew, of King Crimson. “I don’t love it when the guitar sounds like a guitar,” she said. “The problem is, people want to recognize that it’s a guitar. I have facility, and so I feel like I should use it more. I don’t have any other ‘should’ in my music.” (It can be funny, if dispiriting, to read, in the comments sections of her performances on YouTube, the arguments that guitar nerds get into about her chops.)

When she listens to a playback, she often buries her head in her arms, as though she can hardly bear to hear herself, but, really, it’s just her way of listening hard. Once, during a mixing session, while she was at the board and I was behind her on a couch, surreptitiously reading a text message, she picked up her head, turned around, and said, “Did I lose you there, Nick? I can feel when attention is wandering.” Her cheery use of the name of the person she is addressing can seem to contain a faint note of mockery. There’d be times, in the following months, when I’d walk away from a conversation with Clark feeling like a character in a kung-fu movie who emerges from a sword skirmish apparently unscathed yet a moment later starts gushing blood or dropping limbs.

Part of this is a function of Clark’s solicitousness, her courteous manner. “She’s created a vernacular of kindness in her public life,” her close friend the writer and indie musician Carrie Brownstein told me. “But the niceness comes through a glass case.” Clark has observed, of the music industry in this era, that good manners are good business.

Clark and Antonoff had met casually around New York but hardly knew each other until they somehow wound up having what he described as an emotionally intense dinner together at the Sunset Tower in Los Angeles. “She was very open about the things in her life,” Antonoff said. “That’s what I was interested in. Continuing to reveal more and more. I said, ‘Let’s go for the lyrics that people will tattoo on their arms.’ ”

Clark has eight siblings, some half, some step. She’s the youngest of her mother’s three girls. Clark’s parents divorced when she was three. This was in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her father, from a Catholic family with eleven kids, was a stockbroker and a prodigious reader who could recite passages from “Ulysses”; for a while, he had the girls convinced that he was a Joycean scholar. When Clark was ten, he gave her “Lucky Jim” for Christmas. At thirteen, she got “Vile Bodies.” She acquired a knack for punching up: in junior high, she toted around the Bertrand Russell pamphlet “Why I Am Not a Christian.”

By then, Clark’s mother, a social worker, had remarried and moved to the suburbs of Dallas. Clark was reared mostly by her mother and stepfather, and considers herself a Texan. Her father remarried and had four kids, with whom Clark is close. In 2010, he was convicted of defrauding investors in a penny-stock scheme, and was sentenced to twelve years in prison. She has never publicly talked about this, although she told me, “I wrote a whole album about it,” by which she meant “Strange Mercy” (2011), her third. When I asked her if she felt any shame about his crimes, she said, “Shame? Not at all. I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not my shame.”

As a child, Clark was shy, quiet, studious. She played soccer. (There’s a charming video from a few years ago of her demonstrating the mechanics of the rainbow kick, while keeping her hands in the pockets of her overcoat.) Her nickname was M.I.A., because she was so often holed up in her bedroom, listening to music. She was a classic-rock kid—Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull—but the real gateway was Nirvana. “Nevermind” hit when she was nine, and she was precocious enough to notice. Like a lot of kids, she found a mentor behind the counter of the local record store, who turned her on to stuff like Stereolab, PJ Harvey, and Nick Cave. Also like a lot of kids, she started playing guitar when she was twelve. Her first live performance was at age fifteen, at a club in Dallas’s Deep Ellum neighborhood—she sat in with her guitar teacher on “The Wind Cries Mary.” She played bass in a heavy-metal band and guitar in a hardcore outfit called the Skull Fuckers: riot grrrl, queercore, Big Black.

Clark’s uncle—her mother’s brother—is Tuck Andress, a jazz-guitar virtuoso who, since 1978, has performed with his wife, the singer Patti Cathcart, as the duo Tuck & Patti. When Clark was a teen-ager, she spent summers as their roadie on tours of Asia and the United States. After graduating from high school, she worked as their tour manager in Europe. It was a lean outfit, so she handled pretty much everything, from settling with the clubs to fetching towels and water—an aspiring rock star’s mail room. The greatest lesson, though, may have been witnessing the power that music could have over strangers. “I’d watch Tuck & Patti bring people to tears,” she said.

“We knew she was serious about this music thing,” Cathcart told me.

“You couldn’t keep her from it,” Andress said. “But, until you hit the road, you have no idea. Of course, now she travels in a dramatically more luxurious way than we do.”

Clark went to Berklee College of Music, in Boston, but dropped out after two and a half years, itchy to write and record her own music rather than train to be a crack session hire, which is how she saw the program there. The best thing she got from it, she says, is a love of Stravinsky. She still can’t read music. She moved to New York, but after three months ran out of money and retreated to Texas, where a friend who played theremin with the Polyphonic Spree, a big choral-rock band out of Dallas, encouraged her to audition. She toured with them as a singer and a guitar player for a while.

Later, she hired on with Sufjan Stevens, the orchestral-folk artist. He first saw her at the Bowery Ballroom, where she was performing solo as the warmup act for a band she also played in, the Castanets. “She was up there with a guitar, standing on a piece of plywood for a kick drum, two microphones, one of them distorted, and two amps,” Stevens told me. “Obviously, she had talent.” Off she went with another giant band. “At that time, there were a dozen musicians touring in my band, and there was always a moment in the set where people could ‘take a solo,’ ” Stevens went on. “All the men usually just played a lot of notes really fast. But, when Annie’s turn came, she refused to do the obvious white-male masturbatory thing on the guitar. Instead, she played her effects pedals. She made such weird sounds. It was like the Loch Ness monster giving birth inside a silo.”

At the time, Clark had her first album, “Marry Me,” in the can, and sometimes she performed solo before her sets with Stevens. “I didn’t have that performance character she has,” he said. “I kind of wish I had. It’s both personal and protective. To get attention as a woman, in a heteronormative context where sex appeal sells, and to sell yourself instead by emphasizing your skill, ingenuity, and work ethic is an incredible feat.”

The first song on “Marry Me,” “Now, Now,” had her singing, “I’m not any, any, any, any, any, any, any, anything,” which, intentionally or not, sounds like “I’m not Annie, Annie. . . .” You might say that it was the opening salvo in St. Vincent’s still unfolding act of concealment and disclosure.

“This scaffolding that she has been so deliberate in constructing has allowed her to take more risks,” Brownstein said. “She presents this narrow strand of visibility. She can mess around with the whole thing of her being called doe-eyed or a gamine. There’s a classic kind of professionalism in the act, sort of like the old country stars—Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash. They let you know when you have access to their world. It’s a contrivance.”

The new album, by Clark’s own reckoning, is the gloomiest one she’s made: “It’s all about sex and drugs and sadness.” It ends with a song about suicide, which she sings in a husky voice that is downright frightening. (“Like any red-blooded American, I’ve considered suicide,” she told Marc Maron, on his “WTF” podcast.) She says that she wrote it on a tour bus en route from Lithuania to Latvia. Sure, sometimes the Baltics can bring you down, but, beyond that, there’s clearly some serious heartbreak and darkness underlying this new project.

Around the release of the “St. Vincent” album, Clark had been on tour more or less perpetually for ten years. “I was running hard. There were family things, illness,” she said. “I’m a little like a greyhound. Get me running in a direction, and I’ll run myself into the ground.” Among other things, her mother had a health crisis, which Clark doesn’t like to talk about.

“I was hurling myself into crowds, climbing the rafters,” she said. “I felt like, if I’m not bruised and bloody when I come offstage, I haven’t done it right.”

There’s a song on the new album called “Pills.” “Pills to grow, pills to shrink, pills, pills, pills and a good stiff drink / pills to fuck, pills to eat, pills, pills, pills down the kitchen sink.” (As it happens, those lines are sung by Delevingne, who will be credited, for the benefit of the British gossip press, as an underground sensation named Kid Monkey.) “I was trying to hold on,” Clark recalled. “I didn’t have coping mechanisms for tremendous anxiety and depression. I was trying to get through pharmaceutically.”

Clark may resent the assumption that everything she writes about is personal, that the protagonist is always her. “You couldn’t fact-check it,” she said. To questions about sexuality, she insists on fluidity. “I’m queer,” she said. But “the goal is to be free of heteronormativity. I’m queer, but queer more as an outlook.”

Yet there is just one narrator on this album. “The emotional tones are all true,” she said. “The songs are the most coherent expression of them. Songs are like prophecies. They can be stronger than you are.”

One day, during a mixing session at Electric Lady, Clark told me that her favorite lyric on the album was “Teen-age Christian virgins holding out their tongues / Paranoid secretions falling on basement rugs.” Later, she texted me to say that her favorite was actually “ ‘Remember one Christmas I gave you Jim Carroll / intended it as a cautionary tale / you said you saw yourself inside there / dog-eared it like a how-to manual.’ Cause Christmas—carol—Emanuel.” That’s from a song about a hard-luck old friend or lover named Johnny, who hits the singer up for money or support. “You saw me on movies and TV,” she sings. “Annie, how could you do this to me?” I asked her one day who Johnny was.

“Johnny’s just Johnny,” she said. “Doesn’t everyone know a Johnny?”

As Clark neared the end of recording, she turned some attention to the next phases—packaging, publicity, performance. She has observed that, when she makes the rounds to local media outlets or on cattle-call press junkets, she is repeatedly asked the same questions, many of them dumb ones. “You become a factory worker,” she said. “When you have to say something over and over, there’s a festering self-loathing. No better way to feel like a fraud.”

She’d made what she was calling an interview kit, a highly stylized short film, which consists of her answering typical questions. She sits in a chair with her legs crossed, in a short pink skirt and a semitransparent latex top before a Day-Glo green backdrop, with a camera and a sound crew of three female models in heels, dog collars, dominatrix hoods, and assless/chestless minidresses. A screen reads, “Insert light banter,” and then Clark reappears, saying, with a strained smile, “It’s good to see you again. Of course I remember you. Yah, good to see you. How’s—how’s your kid?”

There follows a series of questions and answers, with the former presented as text onscreen—generic placeholders:

Q. Insert question about the inspiration for this record.

A. I saw a woman alone in her car singing along to “Great Balls of Fire,” and I wanted to make a record that would prevent that from ever happening again.

Q. Insert question about how much of her work is autobiographical.

A. All of my work is autobiographical, both the factual elements of my life and the fictional ones.

Q. Insert question about being a woman in music.

A. What’s it like being a woman in music? . . . Very good question.

The camera cuts to her interlaced fingers. She wears paste-on fingernails, each with a letter. They spell out “F-U-C-K-O-F-F.”

There are more—What’s it like to play a show in heels? What are you reading? What album would you want on a desert island?—and her answers are mostly but not always sardonic. They were written by Brownstein. Clark shot another film, a kind of surreal press conference, with a similar deadpan gestalt and Day-Glo color scheme and trio of kinky models. In this version, in reply to the woman-in-music question, she performs a “Basic Instinct” uncrossing of her legs, as the camera zooms in on her crotch, accompanied by the echo of a drop of water in a cave.

These videos don’t quite serve the utilitarian function that Clark had put forth—that of saving her time and energy by furnishing her interrogators with workable answers—but they do convey a sensibility that suits the brand: cheeky, sexy, a little Dada. (They’re more on message, perhaps, than her recently announced role as a star of the new ad campaign for Tiffany.) She’d prefer to embody certain ideas than to have to verbalize them, when the context comprises dubious, inherited, unexamined assumptions about gender, sexuality, songwriting, and celebrity. She prefers gestures to words. She sent me a photo of herself from a video shoot and wrote, “Me performing gender.”

Meanwhile, she was having a costume made for her solo performance: a “skin suit” that would give her the appearance of being naked onstage. One morning, I met her in downtown Los Angeles, at the L.A. Theatre, an old movie palace. She arrived alone in a black BMW M-series coupe. The costume’s designer, Desmond Evan Smith, met her outside, to take advantage of the sun. He had swatches of latex, to compare with her skin. One was too pink, another too yellow.

“This is me with a slight tan,” Clark said. “I’m pretty pale.” She had on cutoff jean shorts, a Western-style shirt knotted above her navel, and the studded loafers. Smith led her to a gilded hallway on the second floor to size her up with a tape measure.

“What do you need me to do?” Clark asked.

“I just need you to stand there and look pretty,” Smith said.

“Done and done.”

He read out her neck, waist, and bust numbers.

“Hear that?” Clark said. “Perfect babe measurements.”

He peeled down her shorts to measure her hips. “Cheetahkini,” she said. “Is that a portmanteau?”

“Spread for me,” Smith said. “Your legs.”

“Comedy gold, Nick,” she said.

Later, when she’d started calling me Uncle Nick or Nicky boy, I’d find myself wondering if this skin-suit episode hadn’t been an elaborate setup, a provocation or even a trap laid by someone known to be in command of her presentation in the world. Or maybe it was just show biz, the same old meat market now refracted through self-aware layers of intention and irony.

“Should we get someone to volunteer to be my body?” Clark asked. “To add a little pizzazz? I could choose my own adventure here. I could get a custom crotch.” She began referring to this as her “perfect pussy.” “I’ll scroll through Pornhub and find one.”

After the skin-suit sizing, Clark drove across town, to a coffee shop off Melrose called Croft Alley, to have lunch with her creative director, Willo Perron. Perron, who is from Montreal, does visual and brand work for a variety of pop stars—Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna. He helps them conceptualize music videos, album covers, and stage shows.

Perron, who is forty-three, wore white jeans and a light-gray T-shirt and black-and-white leopard-print skater shoes from Yves Saint Laurent. (“They may be a bit too rad dad,” he said.) He had a droll, weary air; his expertise was assured but lightly worn. He drives a Tesla. His girlfriend was the waitress at Croft Alley.

He wanted to discuss the album cover. There’d been a shoot in Los Angeles, on the same set they used to film the satirical interview kit. “Did you look at the photos?” he asked Clark. “Can we just do it? It’s good. It’s bold, too. It’s the one that stood out.” He was talking about a photograph I’d first seen on the home screen of Clark’s cell phone: an image of her research assistant, a photographer and model named Carlotta Kohl, with her head stuck through a pinkish-red scrim. Really, it was a picture of Kohl’s legs and rear end, in hot-pink tights and a leopard thong bodysuit. “This is not my ass,” Clark had said. “This is my friend Carlotta’s ass. Isn’t it a nice ass?”

Perron explained to me, “It all started, well— There hasn’t been a female lead who’s been able to be both absurdist and sexual. Sultriness but in a New Wave character. The energy of ‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse,’ ‘Beetlejuice,’ the Cramps, the B-52s, with some chips of Blondie. Think of Poison Ivy, from the Cramps: absurd but hot.”

“Manically happy to the point of being scary,” Clark said.

“We built these Day-Glo canvases and had people sticking limbs and heads through the canvases. Then we found that the most entertaining thing was the back of the canvas: Carlotta ostriched into the wall, just her ass.”

“Can we do it?” Clark said.

“It says everything that we want to say,” Perron said.

“But will people assume that it’s my ass? I’m doing all these body-double things.” She went on, “I was thinking a photo of my face that encapsulates the entire record—but maybe that’s a bit of a fool’s errand.” She mentioned an image from the shoot of herself with some stylists around her.

“It’s too ‘1989,’ ” Perron said.

“Too on the nose?” Clark said.

“It’s a single cover, not an album cover.”

Clark and Perron hooked up four years ago, when she was working on the “St. Vincent” album. “That thing was near-future cult leader,” he said. “We were talking about media and paranoia and blah, blah. Annie referenced ‘Black Mirror.’ It had only been on the BBC. And the films of Jodorowsky. We were working with a 1970 psychedelic aesthetic, plus postmodernist Italian, but in Memphis style.” The cover showed Clark sitting on a pink throne, with her gray hair in a kind of modified Bride of Frankenstein.

“One of the early conversations we had was about how indie rock always does the unintentional thing, so that it doesn’t have an opportunity to fail,” Perron said. By this, he meant, say, a band in T-shirts, looking tough, standing in the back of a warehouse—authenticity as a euphemism for the absence of an idea. “But we wanted pop-level intention.”

“The best ideas are the ones that might turn out to be terrible ideas,” Clark said.

They got into Perron’s Tesla and headed to his office, on the second floor of a house on a residential street nearby. A few assistants worked quietly at laptops. There was a rack of file boxes, with the names of clients: Drake, the xx, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga.

They watched a rough cut of the interview-kit press conference. “There are moments where you seem really pretentious,” Perron said. “But then, the brand should be ‘absurdist.’ ”

Clark said, “Yes, there are moments where people will be, like, ‘Is she just a pretentious dickhead?’ ”

They discussed possible music-video directors and brought examples of their work up onscreen. (One was a duo called We Are from L.A., who are from France.) Then they talked about the solo show, with the skin suit.

“Remember when I said the only ideas worth doing might be terrible ideas?” Clark said. “This might be one. Me solo with the guitar, and other characters who are shambolically me. It’s high-tech Tracy & the Plastics. I want Carrie to write the dialogue.”

“There’s dialogue?” Perron said, wearily.

“Yes, I’m putting aside postmodern choreography for this round. But I like for there to be some physical obstacle to overcome, to help me focus. It’s about manufacturing your strength. You’re wondering why I came to you. It’s because you worked with David Blaine.” Perron said nothing. “It should feel bananas, not pretentious,” Clark went on.

Then Perron said, “Do we want to make a decision on this cover art?”

“Let me look again,” Clark said. “Option one: Carlotta’s ass. Two, one of my selects. A head shot.”

“That gives me the last two or three records,” Perron said. “I want this one to be more aggressive. Let’s move away from that thing.”

“You mean that kooky thing?”

“That sedated thing.”

Clark said, “Let’s do Carlotta’s ass.”

“The label will give us some pushback,” Perron said. “But, honestly, I think it’s great.”

After a few moments, Clark said cheerily, “Fun fact: Carlotta has scoliosis.”

“It’s been a generative time, creatively, and I would like for it to set the stage for a broader vision,” Clark told me one day, with uncharacteristic career-oriented self-seriousness. Talk like this, out of rock-and-roll people, usually means projects, sidelines, interdisciplinary schemes. For example, Clark had an idea to take old Mussolini speeches and make Mad Libs out of them. She’d have her nieces and nephews fill in the missing words and phrases; then, in an art gallery in Italy, Isabella Rossellini would sit and recite the Mad Libs (the script delivered to her by Clark via an earpiece, to add a layer of awkwardness) to a soundtrack of chopped-up, sort-of-recognizable Verdi and a monitor playing clips of Mussolini himself.

Or motion pictures. Last year, Clark co-wrote and directed a short film called “The Birthday Party,” for “XX,” an anthology of horror films directed by women. In it, a suburban mother hides her dead husband’s body inside a large panda suit at her young daughter’s birthday, and it keels over into the cake, providing the film’s subtitle: “The Memory Lucy Suppressed from Her Seventh Birthday That Wasn’t Really Her Mom’s Fault (Even Though Her Therapist Says It’s Probably Why She Fears Intimacy).” At one point, Clark had a development deal to write and direct another film, called “Young Lover,” which is also the name of a song on the new album. A writer in her twenties has a sadomasochistic affair with an older married woman—“ ‘Swimming Pool’ meets ‘Bitter Moon’ meets ‘Blue Velvet’ ” is how Clark pitched it. Recently, Lionsgate, mining properties out of copyright, approached Clark with the idea of directing a film based on “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” with a female protagonist. The writer is David Birke, who wrote the screenplay for “Elle,” with Isabelle Huppert, which had become an obsession of Clark’s. (In the film, Huppert’s character’s father is in prison.) Birke, it turned out, had taken his daughter to see a show during the “Marry Me” tour, ten years ago. So, here was mutual admiration, a chance to play together in the sandbox of success.

The “Dorian Gray” treatment called for six historical settings. “It would be an expensive film to make,” Clark said. She reckoned twenty-five million dollars. “The likelihood of making this film is, like, two per cent. But I don’t care, because it’s fun. Worst-case scenario is I get seen as a hardworking person with ideas in a medium I’m interested in. I sort of subscribe to the idea of the busier you are, the busier you are.”

The day after her session with Perron, we drove up to Laurel Canyon, to Compound Fracture, which is what she calls the house that serves as her studio and working space. Technically, it is not a residence. There is a live room in the den (good for recording drums), a studio in the garage, and, just inside the front door, a white grand piano, with a book on the music rack of the complete Led Zeppelin (tablature for intermediate guitar), and, next to it, some lyrics scribbled on stationery from the Freehand hotel in Chicago: “Doing battle in the shadows / Baby you ain’t rambo (rimbaud).” She keeps a neat, sparse house. She’s a born de-clutterer. The art work is eclectic: a Russ Meyer nude, paintings made by people in extreme mental distress, and a photo mural of the high sage desert of West Texas. There’s a downstairs sitting room—“If musicians want to take a break,” Clark emphasized—with a stocked bar, William Scott busts of Janet Jackson and CeCe Winans, and some show-and-tellable mementos. She took one down: “I was on an ill-fated surfing trip to Barbados, in my 90 S.P.F., and I looked down and there was this cock and balls made of coral.” This had survived the purges. So had a brass heart sent by the surviving members of Nirvana. In 2014, when the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Clark played Kurt Cobain’s part in a live performance of “Lithium.” There was a plaque in recognition of her inclusion, in 2014, on Vanity Fair’s international best-dressed list. “I’ve been wearing athleisure ever since,” she said.

For a while, her friend Jenny Lewis, the singer-songwriter, had slept on the couch down here. “She’s like a tree,” Clark said. “I would take shade in her. She made me eat food, because I forgot.”

Lewis told me, “I would go upstairs, make a quesadilla, cut it in half, and leave a half there. Maybe the little mouse would come. I’d come up later, see the half gone, and think, My work is done here.”

“As an adult, I haven’t cohabitated with another human,” Clark said. “Jenny and I have been on tour so long, we know the ways to not annoy people.”

When they first got to be friends, years ago, “we Freaky Fridayed,” Lewis said. Clark, eager to get away from New York, moved to Los Angeles, and Lewis, escaping some personal rubble in California, moved into Clark’s East Village apartment.

“We shared so much,” Lewis said. “The sacrifices you make for your music, not having a family. Some things unique to being a woman on the road, silly stuff like removing your makeup in filthy sinks around the world. Just being a woman out there trying to keep it together. Also, being a woman in charge, and the nuances of that.”

They also both had fathers who had been incarcerated. Lewis’s had been in prison for two years—“Everyone in my family goes to jail or prison,” she said—and then was diagnosed with colon cancer and died soon after.

Clark wanted to go for a hike in the midday heat. Every day, she tries to put herself in what she calls a stress position—some kind of physical difficulty, to force herself to persevere. We made the short drive from her house to a ridgeline with a view in the direction of Burbank, and began descending a trail through scrub and poison oak. She had on some flats that she called tennis shoes. The dryness made the steeper pitches slick, and she approached them with great care. At one point, a hum of bees caused her to shriek and run. I was reminded of her song “Rattlesnake,” which is about an encounter with a rattler while she was hiking naked in the Texas desert. “I’m afraid of everything,” she said. “I’m almost inured to it. Same with shame. I figured out years ago that, if everything is absurd, then there is nothing to be afraid or ashamed of.”

Despite her stress-position talk, Clark is a creature of habit, a curator of routine. Brownstein recalled insisting that they go on a different hike from this one, a couple of miles away. “She asked that I never drag her anywhere unfamiliar again,” Brownstein told me.

An hour later, we were back at the house. A mixing engineer named Catherine Marks arrived, to listen to some of the mixes on the new album. Clark wanted a fresh set of ears. (The principal mixer, back at Electric Lady, was Tom Elmhirst, an eminence who has worked with Adele, Lorde, Bowie, and Beck.) Marks, a tall Australian, was wearing a tank top that read “La La La.” Clark had showered and changed into a Pink Floyd “The Wall” T-shirt.

They talked about the low end on one of the songs. “I want to give it more balls,” Marks said, which had a good ring to it, in the Aussie accent. “Tom is a genius, obviously.”

“Best idea wins,” Clark said. They talked for a bit about how unprepared each of them had been for how hot Elmhirst is. They went out to the garage studio, which was full of wonderful toys—racks of guitars, various mikes, and an array of vintage synthesizers. Check it out, an E-mu Emulator II.

Marks sat down at the console. “Smells nice in here. It doesn’t smell like dudes.”

“It’s this Japanese incense.”

A Pro Tools session in the dying light of a Laurel Canyon afternoon. Marks got to work checking out the mixes. It was easy to imagine Clark in here alone for hours, days, weeks, thickening and pruning the sound as it scrolled by onscreen. Outside, you could hear a neighbor playing drums and the occasional honk of a lost Uber. Inside, Marks was listening to a track that Clark wanted to reimagine. “The vocoder’s not working for me,” Clark said. “I like the guitar better. If you need to sleaze it up, add Gary Glitter tuning. Just add glam guitar.”

“I can’t turn off what turns me on,” Clark’s voice was singing, while Clark herself stood behind Marks, checking her phone.

“Oh, my God,” she said, eyes suddenly wide. “This is so stupid. Oh, my God.” She typed a response, put her phone down on a preamp, and began pacing in anticipation of a reply. “It’s so convoluted.” She scooped up the phone and read a new text. Typing a reply, she was shaking her head. “What?” Marks asked.

“It’s a cuckold situation,” Clark said. “I can’t talk about it.” This was more than just hot goss. It was the most excited I’d ever seen her. Another exchange of texts, more pacing, head-shaking, the burly laugh. “It’s the first time I’ve felt glee all day.”

Last month, Clark went into a studio, in midtown Manhattan, with her friend the producer, composer, and pianist Thomas Bartlett, to record an alternative version of the new album: just her voice and his piano, a chance to hear, and to preserve, the songs stripped down to their bones. She had signed off on the final masters of the record the day before they started. “I took a whole night off,” she said. She was wearing a leopard-print bodysuit. “Now I’m done with my emotional anorexia, my monastic fantastic. It’s so good to just play music.”

It went like this: An engineer, Patrick Dillett, played a track from the record, then Bartlett spent a few minutes learning it and vamping on an electric piano, and then they went into the recording studio and laid down a few takes, him on a grand piano and her cross-legged on a couch, singing into a mike. After the first take, Dillett said, “It sounds pretty. Is it supposed to?”

“Will I be ashamed of myself?” she asked him.

“I hope so. Isn’t that the point?”

They recorded in sequence and got through several songs a day.

Later that week, she and Bartlett invited a dozen or so friends to hear her perform the album. Among them were David Byrne, Sufjan Stevens, and the singer Joan As Police Woman, who was celebrating her birthday at the studio afterward. They sat in folding chairs. Clark was on the couch, made up and dressed fashionably in a long jacket and pants.

“Now I can feel the feelings,” she said. She made a show of unbuttoning her pants in order to sing.

“The acceptance of beautiful melody is sometimes difficult for a downtown New York musician,” Byrne had told me earlier in the day. But here was Clark, without all the sonic tricks—the jagged guitar and the scavenged beats—accepting her melodies, feeling the feelings. She told me later, “I didn’t realize the depth of the sorrow on the album until I performed it that night.” The next day, she was shelled and had to cancel appointments. “It turns out that that was crucial to my being done with the experience of making it. Now I need to do what I need to do as a performer: I need to be able to disassociate.”

The final song on the album, the one about suicide, concludes with her repeating “It’s not the end,” in a voice that makes you want to bring her hot soup. On the night of the studio performance, she finished singing and sheepishly accepted the applause of her friends. Then she buttoned up her pants and said, “Party time, everyone.” ♦ http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/st-vincents-cheeky-sexy-rock

#Annie Clark #st vincent

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james-christian-things-blog · 5 years

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You Belong with Me

“You Belong with Me” is a song recorded by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. The song was written by Swift and Liz Rose and produced by Nathan Chapman and Swift. It was released on April 18, 2009, by Big Machine Recordsas the third single from Swift’s second studio album, Fearless (2008). Swift was inspired to write “You Belong with Me” after overhearing a male friend of hers arguing with his girlfriend through a phone call; she continued to develop a story line afterward. The song contains many pop music elements and its lyrics have Swift desiring an out-of-reach love interest.

The song won Favorite song at the 2010 Kids’ Choice Awards, and received nominations at the 2010 Grammy Awards for Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. “You Belong with Me” enjoyed commercial success as well; it became a top ten hit in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. In the United States, the song became Swift’s highest-charting single on the Billboard Hot 100 at the time and has become Swift’s third best-selling single. It managed to gain the largest crossover radio audience since Faith Hill’s “Breathe” did in 2000. The single was certified 7× Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The song is one of the best-selling singles worldwide, with worldwide sales of more than 7 million units (according to the IFPI).

The song’s accompanying music video was directed by Roman White. The video featured Swift portraying two characters, a nerd (the protagonist and narrator) and a popular girl (the antagonist and girlfriend), while American actor Lucas Tillportrayed the male lead. The video’s plot centers on the protagonist secretively loving the male lead, although he has a girlfriend. The video won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Female Video at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, but during Swift’s acceptance speech, rapper Kanye Westinterrupted, protesting in support of Beyoncé. The incident caused a reaction in the media, with many coming to Swift’s defense. The song was performed live at numerous venues, including the 2009–10 Fearless Tour, where it was the opening number. It has been covered by various artists, including Butch Walker and Selena Gomez & the Scene, and parodied by “Weird Al” Yankovic.

Background

Swift became inspired to write “You Belong with Me” after she overheard a male friend of hers speaking to his girlfriend on the phone. He acted defensive as his girlfriend yelled at him, and said to her, “No, baby…I had to get off the phone really quickly… I tried to call you right back… Of course I love you. More than anything! Baby, I’m so sorry." Out of the sympathy she felt towards him in the situation, Swift developed a concept for a song.In a writing session with co-writer Liz Rose, Swift explained the situation along with her idea and conceived the song’s opening line, "You’re on the phone with your girlfriend / she’s upset / she’s going off about something that you said." Together, they developed a story line, which described Swift being in love with the male friend and her having the desire for him to break up with his current girlfriend for her. Swift described the song’s concept as "basically about wanting someone who is with this girl who doesn’t appreciate him at all. Basically like ’girl-next-door-itis.’ You like this guy who you have known for your whole life, and you know him better than she does but somehow the popular girl gets the guy every time." Swift recalled, "It was really fun for us to write the line, ‘She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts’.”“You Belong with Me” was first released as a promotional single from Fearless on November 4, 2008, as part of Countdown to Fearless, an exclusive campaign by the iTunes Store;the song was then released as the third single from Fearless on April 18, 2009.

Composition

“You Belong with Me” is a country pop song with a length of three minutes and 52 seconds.According to Kate Kiefer of Pastemagazine, it is “a straight-up pop song." The song is set in common time and has a moderate tempo of 130 beats per minute. It is written in the key of F♯ major and Swift’s vocals spans a little below two octaves, from F#3 to C#5. Swift hints at her country music background in the banjo-inflected introduction of the song. Leah Greenblatt of Entertainment Weekly felt Swift’s vocals were light and twangy while the melody was "lilting”. It follows the chord progression F♯ –C♯–G♯m-B. The instrumentationconsists of clucking banjos alongside new wave electric guitars.

The lyrics to “You Belong with Me” alternate between narrative modes, where she speaks of herself, a male friend whom she has an unrequited crush on, and his girlfriend. Greenblatt described Swift’s role as a storyteller, the song being a narrative set to music, which describes concerning about love and boys “just [being] very hard to catch”. Craig Rosen of The Hollywood Reporter believes “You Belong with Me”’s plot is “confessional” and regards scenarios themed with high school, while Swift “is the girl next door who’s had her heart broken and takes refuge in music”. Lucy Davies of the BBC noted, “Swift deals in the prosaic imagery of high school boys”.In one verse, Swift contrasts herself with her friend’s girlfriend and states, “She wears high heels, I wear sneakers / She’s cheer captain, I’m on the bleachers”, which Davies interpreted as the song’s protagonist feeling envy towards cheerleaders, in particular, the one dating her male friend. In the choruses, Swift attempts “to persuade some boy to come to his senses and submit to her everygirl charms”

Awards and nominations

At the 52nd Grammy Awards, “You Belong with Me” received nominations for three awards. The song received a nomination for the Grammy Award for Song of the Year but lost to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” (2008), for the Grammy Award for Record of the Year but lost to Kings of Leon’s “Use Somebody” (2008), and for the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance but lost to Beyoncé’s “Halo” (2009).“You Belong with Me” won Favorite Song at the 2010 Kids Choice Awards and was nominated for Song of the Year at the 45th Academy of Country Music Awards, but lost to Lady Antebellum’s “Need You Now” (2009). Although “You Belong with Me” did not receive an award for any of the nominations it received at the 52nd Grammy Awards, Swift did win album of the year for Fearless, which the song was a part of.

With You (Chris Brown song)

“With You” is a song recorded by American recording artist Chris Brown for his second studio album, Exclusive (2007). The song was written by Brown, Johntá Austin, Tor Erik Hermansen, Mikkel Eriksen, Espen Lind and Amund Bjørklundwhile production was helmed by Stargate. The song was released as the album’s third single on December 4, 2007 in the United States. It was later released internationally on March 21, 2008. “With You” is composed as a slow R&B ballad that features an acoustic guitar as the base of the arrangement.

“With You” topped the charts in New Zealand and peaked inside the top five in several countries. In the United States, “With You” peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and at number one on the US Pop Songs chart. The music video for “With You” was directed by Brown and Erik White. The video focuses more on Brown and his dance moves while utilizing several visual effects. It won the accolade for “Best Male Video” at the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards.

Background and release

“With You” was written by Brown, Johntá Austin, Mikkel S. Eriksen, Tor Erik Hermansen, Espen Lind, and Amund Bjørklund. Eriksen and Hermansen produced the song under their production stage-name Stargate. Eriksen recorded it at Battery Studios - a recording studio in New York City, New York. Phil Tan mixed the track with assistance from Josh Houghkirk at Soapbox Studio in Atlanta, Georgia.[1] Eriksen and Hermansen, in addition to producing and writing, performed all the instruments featured on the song, with the exception of the guitar, which was provided by Lind.

“With You” was released as the third single from Brown’s second studio album Exclusive (2007), after “Wall to Wall” and “Kiss Kiss” (2007). Before its official single release, the song was first released to digital retailers in certain territories on November 2, 2007, through Zomba Recordings, as a promotional single.More than a month later, on December 4, 2007, Jive Records and Zomba Recordingsserviced the song to rhythmic crossover radio in the United States. They later solicited to contemporary hit radio on January 8, 2008.On March 4, 2008, an extended play for “With You” was released to digital retailers in certain countries, including the United States, featuring the original song and two other remixes by Tracy Young and Kovas.Another extended play was released in selected countries on March 14, 2008, containing the original version and four other remixes. On March 21, 2008, “With You” was released as a digital single in several countries, including Belgium, France, Ireland and Norway. The single featured a B-side, the B&B Remix of “With You”.

Music video

The music video was shot in Los Angeles, California on November 20, 2007. It premiered on music video channels MTV, BET, and Fuse TV during the week of December 3, 2007. In a November 8, 2007 interview with MTV, Brown stated that he co-directed the video as well. “And it shows me more solo. Like, it shows the grown side of Chris – it doesn’t show the kiddie side. ‘Cause with this album, I wanted to blend, I wanted to do all different visuals of me. The first [video] 'Wall to Wall,’ the acting, the vampires, the spookiness, then you go to 'Kiss, Kiss,’ that had the little goofy part, now this one is solo, the main [performer] is me. Me freestyle dancing – just showing people me naturally, not a choreographed routine, just me dancing and showing you what I’m capable of. But at the same time, I was just having fun with the camera, and just one-on-one time with me and my audience." The video was quite popular in American television, reaching number 1 on BET’s 106 & Park for 6 days, and staying on the countdown for 38 days. It has also reached number 1 on MTV TRL for 10 days, replacing Flo Rida’s "Low” and finally retired at number 1 after it stayed on the countdown for 35 days. The music video won the accolade for “Best Male Video” at the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards.

Composition

“With You” is a “folksy” R&B song. According to the music sheet published at Musicnotes.com by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, “With You” utilizes styles of urban and contemporary R&B music and has a moderate tempo of 86 beats per minute.[8] It is written in a key of E♭ major while Brown’s vocals range from E♭4to B♭5 The song follows a basic sequence of E♭5-E♭maj7-A♭7-B♭ as its chord progression. It consists of a slow stuttering beat and an acoustic guitar arrangement that has garnered comparisons to that present in Stargate’s other produced song, Beyoncé’s 2006 hit “Irreplaceable”. Kelefa Sanneh of New York Times said the song could be a cover of “Irreplaceable”, while Nick Levine of Digital Spy called the two songs “kissing cousins”.Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune felt that the song “openly mimics "Irreplaceable” right down to the acoustic guitar riff.“ Lyrically, "With You” is written about teenage love, presented in the lyrics “And now I know I can’t be the only one/ I bet there’s hearts all over the world tonight / With the love in their life who feel the way I feel when I’m with you.”

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sadbirdmusic · 7 years

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2017 Second quarter albums in review

The past three months were truly spectacular in releases. It was often hard to chose one album over another when refining my top ten lists. With it being festival season in the EDM and pop world, and bands coming back for new albums after long hiatuses, it’s no wonder that the past three months have been so amazing. The first quarter started off strong after a rocky 2016, and though the later part of the first quarter was almost lacking, the second quarter picks up the slack and delivers some of the best albums i’ve heard in a long time. It’s important to mention already iconic albums such as Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN., and Father John Misty’s Pure Comedy, as two of the best albums of the year so far, let alone the quarter. Although with some amazing albums, we did get a few albums hat just didn’t quite hit their mark. Some of these albums i was really sad to hear them not as good as their previous albums, or match up to their hype. A couple of these albums are Lorde’s Melodrama (which I still enjoy greatly, but it just wasn’t quite there, you know? It’s hard to beat Pure Heroine), and Halsey’s Hopeless Fountain Kingdom (which just didn’t match the hype - also another very enjoyable album, just was lacking something, and was a little too repetitive in many parts). But these few misses didn’t stop others from pushing out astounding albums. Some people may fight me on my choices, wether they are albums I chose, or did not chose, to put in my top 10′s of each month. Know that these are just my personal opinions. If you enjoy an album I don’t have on here, good! I’m not trying to force my musical opinions on anyone as to make them change theirs. This list is simply my personal choices in what i believe to be the best so far. My method for this process follows. I used multiple sources, including Album Of The Year, the wikipedia page for 2017 releases, and word of mouth to build spotify playlists for each month. After I listen through the nearly hundreds of albums each quarter, I zero in on 10 for each month that have managed to stick around in my mind that I enjoyed. I base my opinions on these albums on a few things: 1. Musical quality (composition, flow, instrumentation) 2. Lyrical quality (if applicable - lyrics can’t be bland or “expected”/stereotypical for the genre), 3. Production quality, and 4. album artwork (much less a factor, but if the album has good artwork, I’ll more likely listen to it). These are in no way ranked 1-10 as in best to not quite best. These lists are simple a groupings of my favorite albums from the months. The links will take you to the Spotify album. April - Absolutely unbelievable. I almost made a top 30 list for this month. 1. Kendrick Lamar - DAMN. (link) [Hip Hop/Rap] 2. Sylvan Esso - What Now (link) [Synth Pop] 3. Vancouver Sleep Clinic - Revival (link) [“Indietronica”/Alternative] 4. Have Mercy - Make The Best Of It (link) [Punk] 5. Father John Misty - Pure Comedy (link) [Indie/Folk] 6. Falling In Reverse - Coming Home (link) [Post Metal/Rock] 7. Lou Canon - Suspicious (link) [Witch House/Synth Pop] 8. Tinie Tempah - YOUTH (link) [Hip Hop/Rap] 9. While She Sleeps - You Are We (link) [Metal] 10. COIN - How Will You Know If You Never Try (link) [Alternative/Synth Pop] May - School’s out, albums out. Get ready for festival season. 1. Tara Terra - Where’s Your Light? (link) [Indie/Alternative] 2. Logic - Everybody (link) [Hip Hop/Rap] 3. Day Wave - The Days We Had (link) [Indie] 4. Paramore - After Laughter (link) [Alternative] 5. Harry Styles - Harry Styles (link) [Alternative/Acoustic] 6. Tigers Jaw - spin (link) [Punk] 7. Free Throw - Bear Your Mind (link) [Punk] 8. Hugh - Love, Hugh (link) [“Indietronica”/Synth Pop] 9. Zola Blood - Infinite Games (link) [Electronica] 10. Truth - Wilderness of Mirrors (link) [Grime/Dubstep/Riddim] June - Oh boy. Too many albums to chose from. 1. Jay Prince - Late Summers (link) [Hip Hop/Rap] 2. London Grammar - Truth Is A Beautiful Thing (link) [Indie/Alternative] 3. James McAlister, Bryce Dessner, Sufjan Stevens, & Nico Muhly - Planetarium (link) [Indie/shoegaze/ambient] 4. Vince Staples - Big Fish Theory (link) [Hip Hop/Rap] 5. LANY - LANY (link) [“Indietronica”/Dream Pop] 6. Camo & Krooked - Mosaik (link) [Drum & Bass/Electronica] 7. Meadowlark - Postcards (link) [ Indie/Dream Pop] 8. Phoenix - Ti Amo (link) [Synth Pop/Indie] 9. Bleachers - Gone Now (link) [Indie/Altnerative] 10. Com Truise - Iteration (link) [Synthwave] 2017 has been holding strong for album releases. If you noticed, included some pretty small artists in the lists, too. It’s entirely possible for big-name artists to be beat out by the little guys because of their raw skill and ideas, and when they’re produced well, that shows that those small artists can only go up from here. As the second half of the year begins, we can all look forward to even more new music that will push the limits of their genres and styles. Artist we know and love may change, for better or for worse. Artists we have never heard of may come to be new favorites in our library. And maybe even that local band you know might release that album they’ve been talking about for months and it’ll just blow you away. May the second half of 2017 only get better, in more than just music.

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wavenetinfo · 7 years

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Every Friday, artists drop anticipated albums, surprise singles, and hyped collaborations. As part of New Music Friday, EW’s music team chooses some of the essential new tunes. From Foo Fighters’ raucous return to Fifth Harmony’s first post-Camila single, here are the week’s most noteworthy releases.

Foo Fighters, “Run”

The latest single from Dave Grohl & Co. is unadulterated alt-rock radio goodness, fusing the sweeping arpeggios of 2007’s “The Pretender” with the breakneck thrash of 2011’s “Rope.” The Foos might’ve dressed up as old folks for the song’s music video, but that’s only because on record they sound as youthfully vital as ever. —Eric Renner Brown

Fifth Harmony ft. Gucci Mane, “Down”

The first Fifth Harmony single since Camila Cabello’s 2016 departure features a bouncing beat, polished vocals, and an unlikely assist from Atlanta trap king Gucci Mane. Best of all, the unexpected union totally works. —E.R.B.

Lorde, “Perfect Places”

For the closer from her upcoming second album Melodrama, due June 16, the New Zealand pop sensation turned to “Green Light” collaborators Jack Antonoff and Frank Dukes once again, as well as Miike Snow frontman Andrew Wyatt. The resulting cut is — you guessed it — another blast of anthemic arena-pop girded by vibrant synths and stomping percussion. —E.R.B.

Arcade Fire, “Everything Now”

The wait for new music from the Canadian indie-rockers has been long — outside of their January collaboration with Mavis Staples, they’ve stayed largely quiet since their absolutely bonkers 2013 double LP Reflektor. But they rewarded patient fans Thursday with the announcement of their fifth album, Everything Now, and the release of its slow-rolling title track. Queue this up and hit the road — this is highway music at its finest. —Madison Vain

Bleachers, “Gone Now”

In recent years, Jack Antonoff’s name has been associated with superstar collaborators like Lorde and Taylor Swift — but Bleachers’ second album, an anthemic collection built around the ideas of loss and moving forward, proves the musician’s just as impressive as a frontman as he is behind the scenes. With songs that range from jazzy to full-on pop, the set is a cohesive but varied compilation of sounds tied together by Antonoff’s dance-worthy brand of catharsis. —Ariana Bacle

Radiohead, “I Promise”

OKNOTOK, the forthcoming 20th-anniversary reissue of Radiohead’s seminal OK Computer, will contain three previously unreleased tracks. Friday, the British alt-rockers shared one of them, “I Promise,” and a music video to go along with it. The cut is peak ’90s Radiohead, with a rat-a-tat, military-issue drum beat and solemnly strummed guitars that evoke “Fake Plastic Trees.” —E.R.B.

Halsey, “hopeless fountain kingdom”

Since breaking big in 2015 with her lo-fi debut, Badlands, Halsey has sung on the Chainsmokers massive hit “Closer,” duetted with Justin Bieber, and, along with playing massive festivals like Coachella, sold out Madison Square Garden. Now, she’s returned with her arena-sized second LP. “Badlands was this kind of DIY record,” she told EW last month. “Now I’ve toured the world and have dans that I want to make happy. The space I need to fill with my sound is not a bedroom anymore, it’s an arena.” —M.V.

Dan Auerbach, “Waiting on a Song”

In a recent interview with EW, the Black Keys frontman described his second solo effort as a “musical stew” of American genres including rock, country, blues, and soul. Auerbach invited ace session musicians such as John Prine, Duane Eddy, and Jerry Douglas to his Nashville studio to bring cuts like shuffling “Livin’ in Sin” and slinky “Cherrybomb” to life. —E.R.B.

Major Lazer, “Know No Better”

Just in time for summer, Major Lazer have returned with a six-song EP packed with club-oriented, globally influenced jams. “Our goals are just to make great music,” de facto frontman Diplo told EW earlier this week. “and these [songs] are all pretty weird.” Dig in. —M.V.

Roger Waters, “Is This the Life We Really Want?”

For the Pink Floyd founder’s first solo album in 25 years, he teamed with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich. Originally conceived as a radio play, it’s long on ballads, but there is the killer uptempo rocker, “Smell the Roses.” It’s also full of his characteristic doomsaying: “It’s like truth is now a completely alien concept,” Waters told EW in May. “Keep people dumb, uneducated, whatever, so you can go on milking them.” —Kevin O’Donnell

alt-J, “Relaxer”

Delicate and sinister, alt-J’s third album is an exercise in extremes and experimentation. “Hit Me Like a Snare Drum” is straight from the ’60s-era New York rock scene, while the menacing “In Cold Blood” could easily soundtrack the villain’s entrance in a ’90s video game. “They are eight very different songs and eight very different moods,” the group’s keyboardist and vocalist Gus Unger-Hamilton told EW. “It’s quite a well-balanced meal — gives you all the food groups emotionally.” The English band could have easily peaked in 2012 when they won the coveted Mercury Prize for their debut, An Awesome Wave; Relaxer is proof that’s far from true. —A.B.

Liam Gallagher, “Wall of Glass”

The mercurial Oasis singer teamed with star producer Greg Kurstin (Adele, Sia) for his swaggering solo single, off his upcoming full-length As You Were. “Wall of Glass” isn’t Oasis, but with its wailing harmonica, angelic backing vocals, and propulsive guitar, it ably revives the iconic sound of the legendary Britpop group’s early records. —E.R.B.

Prophets of Rage, “Unf— the World”

When Prophets of Rage — the supergroup comprised of Rage Against the Machine members, Public Enemy’s Chuck D, and Cypress Hill’s B-Real — debuted last year, they seemed to be a temporary novelty borne from the unrest wrought by America’s controversial election season. But the election of Donald Trump appears to have spurred the radically progressive hard-rock group, and they’re releasing their self-titled debut album in September. Over a quintessentially pummeling RATM beat, Chuck lays out their mission statement on “Unf— the World”: “Give a damn, evil can’t stand when the people take a stand.” Michael Moore directed the cut’s disturbing video, adding to its incendiary effect. —E.R.B.

Elton John & Jack White, “Two Fingers of Whiskey”

For The American Epic Sessions, Jack White and T Bone Burnett recreated Depression-era recording equipment and invited modern artists of all stripes to cut versions of classic tunes. They’ve already released songs by Nas and Alabama Shakes off the upcoming compilation and shared the White and Elton John collaboration “Two Fingers of Whiskey” on Thursday. John’s honky-tonk piano and White’s raw guitar highlight the song, composed by the former’s longtime songwriting partner Bernie Taupin. —E.R.B.

Amber Coffman, “City of No Reply”

The debut solo LP from the former Dirty Projectors singer-guitarist is a batch of 11 effervescent indie-pop songs. “No Coffee” and “Dark Night” feature irresistible, instantly memorable melodies, while cuts like “If You Want My Heart” incorporate some of the sonic weirdness that defined her previous band. “I wanted to do this since I was about five years old,” Coffman told EW last month of the project, which features musicians like percussionist Mauro Refosco (Atoms for Peace, Red Hot Chili Peppers). “It was a really special experience.” —E.R.B.

Dua Lipa, “Dua Lipa”

“I never want to seem weak in my songs,” the 21-year-old told EW earlier this year. “The second I start writing a sad song, I always change it to make it seem like I was more empowered.” That approach yielded her debut, which is the disco record of the summer and features proven hits like “Be the One” and “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” along with fresh cuts like the strutting Miguel duet “Lost in Your Light.” —K.O.

The War on Drugs, “Holding On”

Propelled by twinkling synths and shimmering guitars, the lead single from the Philly band’s upcoming album A Deeper Understanding, out August 25, picks up where their 2014 smash Lost in the Dream left off: Windows-down-and-speeding-down-the-highway heartland rock bliss. —E.R.B.

PARTYNEXTDOOR, “COLOURS 2” EP

The four-song surprise EP from the OVO-affiliated crooner is a gorgeous, brief display of his chilly, after-hours R&B. —E.R.B.

Todd Terje, “Maskindans”

No word yet on when fans can expect the second album from the Norwegian disco-house artist, but Terje dropped a kinetic cover Det Gylne Triangel’s 1982 song “Maskindans” Friday — featuring fresh vocals from Triangel. Nearly breaking 10 minutes, the unrelenting track is another essential dancefloor odyssey from Terje. —E.R.B.

Various Artists, “Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)”

The soundtrack for the Captain Underpants film adaptation is as outrageous and silly as the movie it accompanies. There are original compositions from Lil Yachty, Adam Lambert, and, of course, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s absurd theme song for the tidy whitey crimefighter. —E.R.B.

Benjamin Booker, “Witness”

The 27-year-old Booker sounds something like Otis Redding covering Ty Segall in an abandoned warehouse. His second album is also his best, from the Arcs-esque lilt of “Overtime” to the gospel-tinged title track. —E.R.B.

Broken Social Scene, “Skyline”

Broken Social Scene are no strangers to lyrical repetition — 2003’s “Anthems for a 17-Year-Old Girl,” one of the Canadian collective’s best-known tracks, is almost entirely made of the hypnotizing chant, “Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me” — so it’s no surprise their latest song, the folksy “Skyline,” is just one repeating verse. It’s also unsurprising that its four minutes don’t redundant or tired, but soaring, rousing, and perfect for sunsets. —A.B.

Luke Combs, “This One’s For You”

The country breakout found chart success this year with his moody rocker “Hurricane” — and now he’s dropped a whole collection of scorchers. His debut LP scans the modern country landscape, blending nostalgic heartland rock (“Memories Are Made Of”), cornfield-sized party jams (“Beer Can”), honky-tonk delights (“Honky Tonk Highway”), and bleeding-heart guitar ballads (“One Number Away”). —M.V.

U2, “The Joshua Tree” (Super Deluxe Reissue)

Not lucky enough to catch U2 on their special summer tour commemorating the 25th anniversary of their seminal album The Joshua Tree? Never fear: The Irish rockers have goodies for you, too. This sprawling reissue collects the original album, B-sides from the era, fresh remixes, and a 1987 live set from Madison Square Garden for the definitive document of perhaps the band’s greatest period. —E.R.B.

Bob Marley & The Wailers, “Exodus 40”

The album that TIME named the best of the 20th century celebrates its 40th anniversary tomorrow, and this three-disc reissue marks the occasion. There’s the classic LP, but also a reworked, resequenced version by Marley’s son Ziggy — featuring unearthed vocals and instrumental passages from the sessions — and a sizzling 1977 Marley concert recorded at London’s Rainbow Theatre. —E.R.B.

2 June 2017 | 5:56 pm

Eric Renner Brown, Kevin O’Donnell, Ariana Bacle and Madison Vain

Source : EW.com

>>>Click Here To View Original Press Release>>>

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