Seven Fresh Songs #212
Listen to/watch all seven songs on YouTube. Follow our daily updated playlists on YouTube and Spotify for the 50 latest Song Picks of the Day. Thank you for following us and sharing the excitement.
Growing Pains, the new EP by Will Knox, is a quiet affair: inspired by therapy, the Amsterdam-via-London singer/songwriter connects his own childhood with the one of his newborn son. Aside from the title cut, there is also a beautiful Christmas song on it, which features our new favorite European city, Lisbon, and néomí on backing vocals.
Mary Middlefield has lived all her life in Lausanne, Switzerland, so her songwriting developed far away from the world’s hotspot music scenes. That does not keep her from presenting an absolute indie rock banger with her new single, “Young and Dumb.” The song will be on her new EP, out on April 28.
Jason Gould is the son of Barbra Streisand. You can speculate whether that helped or hurt his journey of making music. In the end, he says he couldn’t live his life any differently: “[Creativity is] the most important element of my own wellness and peace of mind.” His song “Sacred Days” is a beautiful, smart pop piece in the veins of Roland Orzabal (Tears For Fears.)
“Slow” starts in the bedroom and ends in a kathartic celebration of life. “This song represents the moment where the fog lifted, and I saw what I needed to grow, but wasn’t fully sure how to get there,” LA singer/songwriter Holly Blair says, and you can feel this in her music. She is also a filmmaker, so enjoy the video, despite being only a quick shot “home video:”
At the beginning of “Breach,” you would not think that you’re in for such a wild ride, including a crazy guitar solo. That fits the situation the Brooklyn artist Nisa wants to cover here. “‘Breach’ is a rehearsal of a break-up with an inconstant version of myself,” she explains.
The lower-case lovers mui zyu and lei, e collaborated for “sparky” — and drove my spell checker crazy. The song is about happiness, but it wouldn’t be mui zyu if there were not a quirk to it: “the song is named after the dog ‘Sparky’ from the opening of David Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’ who is the perfect image of joyfulness — biting water from a hose in front of their dead owner,” she explains. Still, the overall mood fits the spring theme of this newsletter.
If you search for Annie-Dog you probably will find a song by The Smashing Pumpkins from their ’98 album Adore. Don’t stop there, but look out for “Double Cherry” from the Dublin artist, who borrowed the name from the US band. The song is an absolute indie pop gem, and we are looking forward to hearing more from her this year.
