Best of What’s New

Hard to believe it’s Saturday again. Today also marks the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., which I find even more mind-boggling. While this blog is focused on music and rarely addresses other topics, having lived in New York at the time, this sad milestone is something I simply cannot ignore.

Like many other folks, especially those living in America in September 2001, I still remember aspects of this day, as if everything just had happened yesterday: The beautiful late summer weather; my boss telling the staff a jet plane (the first one) had just crashed into the World Trade Center; crossing 7th Avenue from my office in midtown Manhattan in the early afternoon and strangely not seeing any smoke when looking south or anything else unusual, other than more people walking in the street; making it onto a crowded subway train later in the day (after service had been restored) to get back to my apartment in Queens; watching the images of the carnage on CNN over and over again in disbelief…

I also remember something else, and this is the final point I’d like to make about 9/11. In the wake of the attacks, this country came together in many remarkable ways. There was a true sense of community and coping together. Political and other differences apparently didn’t matter much any longer. I just wish some folks who like to divide us would remember that spirit. The country could really use it today!

On to newly released music. This Best of What’s New installment features three music acts that are entirely new to me, as well as well as an artist I’ve listened to for more than 40 years. There’s some indie, some rock, some pop and some alternative, making for a good variety of music. Let’s get to it!

Colleen Green/I Wanna Be a Dog

I’d like to start with Colleen Green, an indie pop artist based in Los Angeles. According to her Apple Music profile, she is known for her sweetly gritty, lo-fi pop sound. Influenced by bands like the Ramones, Sublime, and the Descendents, Green’s early self-recorded tapes like 2010’s Milo Goes to Compton and 2011’s Cujo, were breezy punk- and new wave-inflected productions featuring Green’s home-blended mix of vocals, guitars, keyboards, and simple drum-machine beats. She has retained her lighthearted spirit even as her music has grown more ambitious and musically organic, as on 2015’s I Want to Grow Up and her 2019 EP, Colleen Green. Born in 1984 in Dunstable, Massachusetts, Green spent time in Boston before moving to Oakland in 2009 with a handful of friends. Once there, they began playing live shows in their living room. However, after experiencing some health problems, Green moved to her brother’s house in Los Angeles. It was during this period, armed with little more than a guitar and a drum machine, that she began writing and recording music at home. After releasing an EP and a cassette tape in 2010, Green secured a deal with Hardly Art Records and released her sophomore album Sock It To Me in March 2013. I Wanna Be a Dog is a nice track from her new album Cool that dropped yesterday (September 10) – reminds me a bit of Sheryl Crow!

Hawthorne Heights/The Rain Just Follows Me

Hawthorne Heights are a rock band formed in 2001 in Dayton, Ohio as A Day in the Life – and yep, that was a reference to the Beatles song. After signing with Confined Records, the band released their debut album Nine Reasons to Say Goodbye as A Day in the Life. By the time of their next release, The Silence in Black and White from June 2004, the band had changed their name to Hawthorne Heights. It looks like this album and the follow-on, If Only You Were Lonely from February 2006, have been their most successful releases to date, both in terms of chart performance and sales. The group’s current line-up includes founding members JT Woodruff (lead vocals, rhythm guitar, piano, keyboards) and Matt Ridenour (bass, backing vocals), along with Mark McMillon (lead guitar, backing vocals) and Chris “Poppy” Popadak (drums, percussion, backing vocals). The Rain Just Follows Me, credited to all four members of the group, is the melodic title track from the band’s new album that also came out yesterday.

Sting/If It’s Love

The former frontman of The Police who after the group’s breakup launched his solo career in 1985 doesn’t need an introduction. On September 1, Sting announced a new album titled The Bridge that is scheduled for November 19. This coincided with the release of lead single If It’s Love. From the announcement: The Bridge was written in a year of global pandemic and finds Sting ruminating on personal loss, separation, disruption, lockdown, and extraordinary social and political turmoil...He [Sting – CMM] explains, “These songs are between one place and another, between one state of mind and another, between life and death, between relationships. Between pandemics, and between eras – politically, socially and psychologically, all of us are stuck in the middle of something. We need a bridge.” While this sounds like a somewhat grim description, If It’s Love is an upbeat pop tune penned by Sting, illustrating not all is doom and gloom. “I’m certainly not the first songwriter to equate falling in or out of love with an incurable sickness, nor will I be the last,” Sting commented in the above announcement. “’If It’s Love’ is my addition to that canon where the tropes of metaphorical symptoms, diagnosis, and downright incapacity are all familiar enough to make each of us smile ruefully.”

Pedro Samp/Harlequeen

Concluding this Best of What’s New installment is new music by Pedro Samp, a young talented music artist and multi-instrumentalist who was born in Rio de Janeiro and is based in Reigate, a small town located approximately 23 miles south of London. Samp already was exposed to music as a three-year-old, listening to his dad’s CD collection. Coincidentally, it included The Police. At the age of 11, he traded with one of his friends a Nintendo video game and two Led Zeppelin CDs for a Fender Stratocaster – gotta love this! By the time Samp was 19, he already worked on scoring movie soundtracks and also was the lead guitarist and songwriter for Crooked Kings, a UK indie band that toured nationally. After leaving the group, Samp launched a solo career in October 2019. To date, he has released 14 singles including his latest, Harlequeen, which came out on August 28. Samp does all the writing, singing, recording and arranging by himself. In addition to his main instrument the guitar, he plays bass, piano, synthesizer and also produces his own beats. Admittedly, it took me a couple of listens to appreciate this tune. Now, I’m kind of hooked! 🙂

Sources: Wikipedia; Apple Music; Sting website; YouTube