RIGHT ARM RESOURCE UPDATE JESSE BARNETT [email protected] (508) 238-5654 www.rightarmresource.com www.facebook.com/rightarmresource 2/10/2021 Kaleo “Break My Baby” The new single from their forthcoming album Surface Sounds, out 4/23 Early: KCMP, Music Choice, WCNR, KVYN, WCLX, KVOQ, KJAC, KVNA, KPND, WAPS, WZLO, WVMP, KMMS, WJCU, KOIT... Watch their amazing new video for it on my website “The pounding beat and JJ’s breathless wail are practically hair-raising in their unquenchable desire...” - Atwood Magazine Tune-Yards “hold yourself.” The first single from sketchy., out 3/26 #1 Most Added! New: WXRV, WXPN, WFPK, WYEP, KTBG, KXT, Music Choice, WPYA, WNCS, KVNA, WRSI, WZEW... Early: WRNR, WFUV, KCMP, KCSN, WYMS, KVOQ, KJAC, WDST... Fantastic press “Centered around Garbus’ powerhouse vocals, the gauzy, bass-heavy beat ballad delivers a potent message of self-empowerment” - Pitchfork LP “How Low Can You Go” Her new single, going for adds now New: WRLT, WRNR, WDST, KVOQ, KUTX, WAPS, WTMD, WCBE, KUMT ON: KBCO, Music Choice, WXPK, KTBG, KXT, WYMS, WCNR, KMTN, WVMP, WYCE, WZLO... Over 6MM streams since its release in November Fall 2021 tour scheduled Nearly 5MM monthly listeners on Spotify Official video and livestream full-band performance online now Weezer “All My Favorite Songs” From OK Human out now Mediabase 22*, BDS Monitored Debut 14*, Indicator 9*! Mediabase Alt 12* New: WXRV, KRVB, WQKL, WKLQ, WNCS, WZEW, WCOO, KROK... ON: KBCO, KINK, KGSR, WRNR, WRLT, WMMM, WXPK, Music Choice, KCMP, WFUV, KCSN, WPYA, WFPK, WYEP, KVOQ, KTBG, WAPS, WCNR... Recorded last summer with a 38 piece orchestra Stadium tour planned Great album reviews Passenger “Sword From The Stone” From Songs For The Drunk And Broken Hearted, out now Mediabase 36*, BDS Monitored #1 New & Active, Indicator Debut 27*! New: WWCT, WCNR, WZEW, KROK ON: WRLT, KINK, WXRV, KRVB, WPYA, Music Choice, WXPK, WCLZ, KCSN, WAPS, KPND, WNCS, KVNA, KJAC... Ed Sheeran remix on PlayMPE “…a hauntingly beautiful collection of Americana gold, and likely Passenger’s finest and most focused record yet.” - Glide Taylor Swift feat. The National “coney island” From evermore, her second surprise album Mediabase 23*, BDS Monitored 26*, Indicator 29*, JBE Albums 20* ON: SiriusXM Spectrum, WXRV, WRLT, WRNR, WFUV, WMMM, KCSN, KXT, KVOQ, KRVB, WPYA, WNCS, KTHX, WQKL, WKLQ, WCNR, WTMD, WYEP, WFPK, Music Choice, WWCT... “evermore is even better than folklore, thanks to greater sonic cohesion and stronger songwriting.” - AV Club The Black Crowes “Charming Mess” From the deluxe Shake Your Money Maker, out February 26 Mediabase 33*, BDS Monitored 31*, Indicator 24*! New: KGSR, KBCO, WAPS, WMWV... ON: WXRT, WXRV, WRLT, WFUV, WXPN, WCLZ, WYEP, KCSN, WFPK, Music Choice, WCNR, WTMD, WNCS, WZEW, WPYA, WNRN... Originally set to be the band’s first single, but was left off of the album “We had plenty of hit songs on that record; I guess we didn’t need it.” - Chris Bahamas “Trick To Happy” From Sad Hunk Mediabase 48*, BDS Monitored New & Active, Indicator 12*! Played last week on Kimmel New: WRNR, WPYA, KBAC, KLRR ON: WXRV, WRLT, Music Choice, WFPK, KCSN, KXT, WCLZ, WNCS, KTBG, KVOQ, WDST, WCNR, WYEP, KJAC, WTMD, KTSN, WNRN, KRSH... “Surround yourself with good people. If someone’s in your life, and they’re just giving you bullshit, cut them out— don’t waste your time on that.” - Afie to American Songwriter Future Islands “Plastic Beach” From As Long As You Are Mediabase 37*, BDS Monitored Debut 37*! New at KMTN ON: WXRV, WXPK, KCMP, WFUV, KCSN, Music Choice, WRLT, WTMD, WCNR, KTBG, WYEP, KVOQ, WPYA, WYMS, WFPK... “Herring steals the spotlight again on “Plastic Beach,” perhaps the most Future Islands-y song on this album. While he’s often fighting valiantly to win the love of someone else, here, rather, he’s struggling through a long battle to self-love.” - Paste ONR feat. Sarah Barthel (of Phantogram) “Must Stop” From his upcoming EP BDS Monitored New & Active, Mediabase Alt 24*! New at WYEP ON: WRLT, WMMM, KCMP, WXRV, KXT, WTMD, KCSN, WNCS, WCNR, KTBG, KJAC, KVOQ, KVNA, WCOO, WAPS, WDST... Over 1MM streams on Spotify “A song about being repeatedly hurt. About a lack of self- worth, a desperation to be in love and to be loved by someone, anyone — and the blows you can take when you leave yourself so open.” - ONR (Robert Shields) Julien Baker “Faith Healer” From Little Oblivions, due February 26 Mediabase 26*, BDS Monitored 17*, Indicator 23*, JBE Albums 6*! New: WEHM, WVMP, WMWV ON: KBCO, WXRV, WRLT, KRVB, Music Choice, KCMP, WFUV, WXPN, KCSN, WYEP, KTHX, WPYA, WFPK, WYMS, KVOQ, KTBG, WCLZ... Great Virtual Summit Fest set! “Not only the most richly produced, pop-aware release of Baker’s career, but also her most unsparingly honest in its messiness.” - Rolling Stone Semisonic “Basement Tapes” From the You’re Not Alone EP BDS Indicator #40! ON: KGSR, WRNR, WFUV, KCMP, WXPK, WFPK, Music Choice, WPYA, KCSN, WEHM, KVNA, WTMD, WCNR, KJAC... “A blazingly catchy and colorful rocker that could be about the nascent days of any rock band.” - Minn. Star Tribune “The arrangements are streamlined yet sturdy, from the propulsive “Basement Tapes” to the memorable title track.” - Under The Radar Aaron Lee Tasjan “Up All Night” The first single from Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan!, out now JBE Albums 47*! New: KEXP, KBAC ON: WRLT, KCSN, WXPK, WPYA, WTMD, WFPK, KJAC, KVYN, WAPS, KTBG, WEHM, KRSH, WZEW, WUIN, KMTN, KRML, WTYD, WVMP... “‘Half party anthem, half cautionary tale. It’s inspired by the times I’ve wondered if I need to get help with my drinking and what it meant that I was worrying about things in the first place?” - Aaron on the single Ron Gallo “HIDE (MYSELF BEHIND YOU)” From PEACEMEAL, out this Friday ON: WRLT, WFUV, WXPN, WYMS, KCSN, KJAC, WCNR, WEHM, WNRN, WCLX, WLKR, WJCU, KROK... “HIDE is about being with someone because how they make you feel or the idea of them rather than who they really are. Sometimes we say “I love you, I want to be with you” but maybe we really mean “I don’t like me, I don’t want to be with myself and you can help distract me from me.” - Ron The AV Club weighs in on Weezer’s OK Human “It was supposed to be the year of Van Weezer. After putting out a dozen studio albums (13 if you count the all-covers Teal Album), Weezer had planned to release Rivers Cuomo’s homage to the metal music of his youth in 2020. Instead, COVID-19 happened, and Cuomo did what many of us have done over the past year: turned inward and looked for ways to pass the time. Unusually for the artist, he’s left a pretty open-book recording of that process, albeit one with new window dressing adorning his usual pop-rock nuggets. There are no shredding guitars to be found on OK Human; instead, Weezer has looked past the ’80s to the early ’70s and the heyday of the orchestral pop album. Of course, this being Weezer, there’s not exactly a profound shift in songwriting, so much as a substitution of a 38-piece orchestra for the guitars and synths of records past. Instead of distorted riffs, there are strings—fierce, muted, and pizzicato in equal mea- sure—providing the melodies that drive these songs. There’s a stately restraint to most of the music. A few upbeat numbers at- tempt to quicken the pulse (“Grapes Of Wrath” is a standard-issue Weezer single), but the album’s overriding mood is one of thoughtful reflection. It’s a vibe that suits Cuomo and company; this many albums into its career, Weezer could stand to take a step back, take stock, and reorient itself along a wavelength less beholden to the earworm wannabe-hits that have come to exemplify the band’s sound at this point. As much as it may be borne of COVID-based necessity, this record is a logical progression. Those who gave a close listen to 2019’s The Black Album heard an antecedent of this sound, what with its general lack of punchy rock and emphasis on acoustic guitar, piano, and gently processed arrangements. (Even better, there are none of that record’s misbegotten attempts at rapping and dance-R&B jams.) There’s always been a forlorn singer-songwriter side to Cuomo, even at his most trend-chasing nadirs, and by embracing the retro sounds that inspired that aspect of his writing, the musician has found a happy medium between his radio-friendly aspirations and the throwback pleasures that have stayed hidden beneath the band’s too-polished 21st-century sheen. It’s evident in the album opener and lead single, “All My Favorite Songs,” which fuses a traditional Cuomo vocal pattern and melody to Beach Boys har- monies, simple Harry Nilsson-style string arrangements (the press materials for OK Human name-check both acts for a reason), and lyrics that straddle the line between evocative and overwrought without going too far in either direction. It’s solid, in other words—which isn’t damning with faint praise, rather affirming that Weezer is nailing this material. It’s in the slower, more balladry-driven songs that OK Human (the latest in a long line of stupid reference-heavy album titles, this time nodding at Radio- head’s classic) finds its openly beating heart. The lilting beauty of “Numbers” is an ode to humans’ innate ability to find ourselves lacking in comparison to others, which nonetheless finds salvation in companionship. (“I hear the sadness in your laughter” is as good a refrain lodestone as Cuomo’s penned in years.) “Playing My Piano” is the singer at his most nerdily vulnerable, testifying to the healing power of the title instrument, which transcends even the calls of loved ones. And “Dead Roses” is the rare instance of Cuomo allowing his voice a bit of fragile quaver, stripping away the studio bells and whistles (at least, until the vocal doubling comes in) to provide raw and unvarnished lyrical storytelling paired with some genuinely impressive orchestral arrangements that suggest how good he could be, if only he truly jettisoned the easy familiarity of his comfort zone for something more daring. The whole project provokes a Sliding Doors-like moment of consideration for what could have been: Rivers Cuomo as songwriter and producer, rather than normcore pop star. His songcraft and gift for melody have always outstripped his vocal talents, and some of these tracks are nothing if not reminders that his own merely adequate voice may not be suited to the expansive pop he’s crafted here, more a Brill Building mastermind than a Nilsson- or Wilson- like talent for delivering his own work himself. Listening to OK Human, it’s clear that had he chosen to go that direction, the musician could well have found himself penning classic hits for every would-be pop singer under the sun, a Jack Antonoff-like Svengali for those with powerhouse pipes and a need for artistic shepherding. (After hearing this record, the mind boggles to consider the potential greatness of, say, a Katy Perry album co-written and produced by Cuomo. “Roar” is practically a latter-day Weezer song, when you think about it.) Still, when he doesn’t get in his own way with an overabundance of verbiage and references, Cuomo delivers commanding orchestral pop music—with a minimum of fuss. OK Human clocks in at barely half an hour, its dozen songs including a one minute-plus, refrain-only anthem (“Mirror Image”) and a 24-second keyboard palate cleanser leading into “Here Comes The Rain,” one of the most unabashedly sunny ditties the band has ever laid down. A great piano riff leads into a thumping kick drum, followed by a rich upbeat melody, like the start to a happy ’70s movie. “Here comes the rain / It’s gonna wash all my troubles away.” Hoary and clichéd, yes, but it works; this is the melding of SoundCloud bedroom pop and adult contemporary at its semi-finest. OK Human likely won’t convert any new followers, save for maybe a few fans of the same old-school muses Cuomo is aping. But it should remind Weezer’s dog- gedly loyal fanbase that the singer’s ear for melodicism remains second to none—and when the musical accompaniment rises to meet the challenge, as it often does here, it’s a testament to why we keep coming back.” - The AV Club, 1/28/21 Rolling Stone talks to Aaron Lee Tasjan about self-doubt, sexuality and more “Last April, Aaron Lee Tasjan was one of the artists who was invited to perform as part of Willie Nelson’s virtual “Come and Toke It” livestream, a 4-hour-20-minute musical celebra- tion infused with a healthy amount of THC. As part of the appearance, the East Nashville singer-songwriter got to meet and chat with his hero Nelson and then play a few songs. It should have been a triumphant occasion, but at least one unhappy viewer threatened to ruin the experience for Tasjan. “This lady, apparently her cat had gotten really out of sorts when my guitar playing started happening and her cat was running around the room, screaming and upset,” Tasjan recalls during a Zoom conversation with Rolling Stone. “She had tagged all the people who were involved with the show in her tweets. I got so mad that I walked out of my house into the front yard and threw my guitar in the trash can.” At that early point in the pandemic, Tasjan hadn’t quite accepted that performances were mostly going to be that way for a while. Once he had a second to cool down, he sheepishly went back outside and retrieved his instrument from the bin. “I’m sure every- body’s had at least one moment like that during this thing,” he says. That struggle to trust his instincts and filter out the noise of this overly noisy moment are threads running through Tasjan’s latest album, Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan!, released last week. During the album’s creative stages, Tasjan had to reckon with his label New West’s expectations and confront his own doubts about his abilities as a songwriter. He poured those into several new songs, including the rumbling “Don’t Overthink It,” with its Kinks-esque melody, and “Computer of Love,” which sounds a little like Elliott Smith embracing synthesizers. On “Not That Bad,” a fingerpicked acoustic guitar drives Tasjan’s description of erasing his recordings and starting over but not getting the desired feedback. “I sent it to the label/but I never got a call,” Tasjan sings. “I had to do a lot of soul searching and figure out a good place to be coming from, as far as my perception of myself as an artist and a songwriter,” he says. “I really spent a period of time doubting all of that in a significant way that, honestly, I feel like I was lucky to be working on a record while I was going through that. To be able to say that in a song and then be able to go in and sing it helped me to feel like I still had something to say as an artist and could do it in a way that I would feel proud of.” Along with this slow renewal of confidence, Tasjan was also writing songs that explored sexuality (particularly his own) and expres- sions of gender that veered from the norm. The single “Up All Night” takes the kind of lush, melodic backdrop the Traveling Wilburys did so well and marries it to a disco beat, while Tasjan describes his dating experiences in Nashville between tours. “I broke up with my boyfriend, to go out with my girlfriend,” he sings. “Cause love is like, love is like, love is like that.” “I met a wonderful man on [Tinder],” he says. “Our first date ever, we went to the Lipstick Lounge, which is a really cool karaoke bar here in East Nashville, and we sang ‘I Got You Babe’ by Sonny and Cher. Then life got back to reality for me. I was back on tour all the time. It was hard to maintain a relationship really, and it fizzled out like relationships do. Then I met my partner Erica, who I’ve been with now for two and a half years and we live together.” Tasjan’s fluidity also courses through the standout “Feminine Walk,” which looks to androgyny as a polarizing source of rock & roll power, namechecking David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Mick Jagger, Grace Jones, Joan Jett, and the camped-up drag of the film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. (Tasjan has long embraced glammy androgyny and once toured as a member of the New York Dolls; he’ll pay tribute to the band’s late guitarist Sylvain Sylvain in an upcoming tribute livestream.) “Those are all people I remember being physically attracted to as a young person when I saw them and wondering what that meant,” he says of Bowie, Bolan, et al. “They’re approaching their gender and their existence with a healthy amount of curiosity. And that’s how I’ve always felt, like, what does it mean that I think this or that I feel that? I’m always asking those questions of myself and knowing that there’s not an answer, but still feeling compelled to explore.” Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan! also moves the artist several steps toward the dreamy Britpop, spaced-out glam-rock, and the kitchen-sink approach of Beck that were quieter presences on his more folky, straightforward releases Silver Tears and Karma for Cheap. Album opener “Sunday Women” has the kaleidoscopic jangle of Big Star, while “Up All Night” and “Got What I Wanted” show off Tasjan’s imaginative approach to the guitar, his effects-laden solos turning it into something that feels synthetic and alien. “It sounds like something almost that doesn’t exist,” he says. “That’s what I wanted to do: create a sound where someone would be like, ‘I wonder what that instrument is.’” It’s more of an Annie Clarke or Radiohead way of looking at the instrument, because, as Tasjan notes, there are plenty of killer players still firmly rooted in rock. “You can look at Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit and say, ‘Man, those guys are doing everything right with classic rock guitar.’ I don’t think that I need to add anything to that conversation, because they are nailing it,” he says. Meanwhile, the conversations outside and online continue to rage, with everyone feeling free to offer a Twitter take about Tasjan’s guitar sounds or his politics. He’s tried to be thoughtful and upbeat as he engages with them, but he’s learning when it’s time to back away, for the sake of his own self-confidence. “I’ve tried my hardest to sort of be like the Diet Sprite of Twitter and just be as positive as I can in hopefully ways that don’t feel disin- genuous,” Tasjan says. “But I have to be honest with you, I don’t really feel that way inside all the time. A lot of times, I’m doing that to try and pull myself out of the way that I am feeling.”” - Rolling Stone, 2/9/21 Coming up for adds... 2/22: William The Conqueror “Wake Up”... 3/1: Cas Haley “All The Right People,” Edie Brickell & New Bohemians RIGHT ARM RESOURCE WEEKLY UPDATE - 2/10/2021