Olivia Rodrigo Sour hit #1

Sour Olivia Rodrigo

Released: May 21, 2021 Peak: 15 US, 15 UK, 110 CN, 18 AU Sales (in millions): 3.0 US, 0.6 UK, 4.58 world (includes US and UK) Genre: pop

Tracks: Song Title (date of single release, chart peaks) Click for codes to charts. Brutal (6/5/21, 12 US, 29 AR, 13 CN, 12 AU) Traitor (6/5/21, 9 US, 23 AC, 15 A40, 5 UK, 9 CN, 5 AU) Drivers License (1/8/21, 18 US, 16 RR, 9 AC, 14 A40, 19 UK, 17 CN, 16 AU, 7 DF) 1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back (6/5/21, 19 US, 17 US, 18 AU) Déjà Vu (4/1/21, 3 US, 19 AC) Good 4 U (5/14/21, 11 US, 16 RR, 12 AC, 11 A40, 15 UK, 16 CN, 14 AU, 12 DF) Enough for You (6/5/21, 14 US, 14 CN, 14 AU) Happer (6/5/21, 15 US, 15 CN, 15 AU) Jealousy, Jealousy (6/5/21, 24 US, 36 UK, 21 CN, 22 AU) Favorite Crime (6/5/21, 16 US, 17 UK, 14 CN, 13 AU) Hope Ur Ok (6/5/21, 29 US, 23 CN, 23 AU) Total Running Time: 34:41

Rating: 4.077 out of 5.00 (average of 33 ratings) Quotable: “A collection of polished, precociously accomplished pop that doubles as one of the most gratifyingly undignified breakup albums ever made.” – Rachel Aroesti, The Guardian Awards: (Click on award to learn more).

About the Album: At the beginning of January 2021, Olivia Rodrigo “was playing in the celebrity minor leagues, the not-quite-18-year-old star of the Disney+ show High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.” PF By month’s end, she “had smashed streaming records and blanketed TikTok with her debut single, Drivers License, a piano-driven power ballad steeped in suburban malaise and teen anguish,” PF “written among the ruins of first love.” GN It had the biggest first week for any song ever on Spotify and went on to reach 100 million streams faster than any song in history. GN It debuted at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent eight weeks at the pinnacle. The magazine called it “one of the most dominant number-one songs of the last 30 years” WK and, at year’s end, named it the song of the year. The song also landed Grammy nominations for Song and Record of the Year and won for Best Pop Solo Performance. Rodrigo also proved to be a commercial and critical juggernaut beyond “Drivers License.” The follow-up singles, Déjà Vu and Good 4 U, debuted at #8 and #1 respectively, making Rodrigo the first artist in history to have her first three chart entries debut in the top ten. WK Those three singles preceded the release of Sour, setting it up for the biggest opening week on Spotify for a female artist. WK It topped the album chart and was named album of the year by Billboard and Rolling Stone. It also won the Juno International Album of the Year award and got Grammy attention, securing a nod for Best Album and a win for Best Pop Vocal Album. She also took home the coveted Best New Artist prize. Rodrigo said the album title referred to the “emotions young people experience but are often criticized for, such as anger, jealousy, and unhappiness.” WK “Writing a whole album about how furious and devastated you are that your ex has forgotten you seems like the sort of thing any good friend would strongly advise against,” GN but Sour is “a nimble and lightly chaotic grab bag of breakup tunes, filled with both melancholy and mischief.” PF She does it all without resorting to “the meaningless word salad that popstars often hide behind.” GN She uses the “angsty and uptempo” WK Brutal “to rattle off her grievances: self-doubt, impossible expectations, her inability to parallel park.” PF The “sweet-and-sour ballad Happier” PF features “lyrics admitting selfishness and exuding self-criticism” WK as “she grapples with the faulty narrative of female rivalry.” PF Traitor is “an indie pop ballad with a folk instrumental” WK and lyrics about “post-grief anger and bargaining.” WK Enough for You is “a minimal bedroom pop song” WK about being “very insecure and vulnerable.” WK Favorite Crime is an indie pop song with a “thinly veiled Bonnie and Clyde-type metaphor.” WK “Like any teenager, Rodrigo is trying on identities.” PF She said, “My dream is to have it be an intersection between mainstream pop, folk music, and alternative pop.” WK “Brutal” is “anthemic 90s alt-rock…in the vein of the Breeders ‘Cannonball.’” GN On “Good 4 U” one “might hear pop punk fireworks à la Paramore” PF while 1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back offers “dewy-eyed soft balladry à la Ingrid Michaelson” PF and Jealousy, Jealousy serves up “alt-rock squall à la the Kills.” PF Rodrigo has cited Alanis Morissette, Kacey Musgraves, No Doubt, and the White Stripes as influences WK but has “most obviously styled herself after Taylor Swift.” PF She “treats emotional turmoil like jet fuel, and laces her lyrics with specifics – a Billy Joel song she and her ex listened to together, the self-help books she read to impress him.” PF “1 Step Forward” interpolates Swift’s “New Year’s Day” PF and “Déjà Vu” was inspired by Swifty’s “Cruel Summer.” On Hope Ur Ok, Rodrigo “steps away from…self-referential narratives to secondhand stories from her friends.” WK “Over a twinkly instrumental, Rodrigo sings directly to a victim of child abuse, a queer girl rejected by her family, and to outcasts more broadly.” PF “It reads as a last-minute effort to demonstrate perspective and maturity.” PF “It’s as close to a palate cleanser as a song with such a cloying sentiment can get, but thankfully doesn’t overshadow the glorious myopia of Sour.” GN

Resources and Related Links: DMDB encyclopedia entry for Olivia Rodrigo GN The Guardian review by Rachel Aroesti (5/21/2021) PF Pitchfork WK Wikipedia First posted 2/17/2023.

Taylor Swift wins third Grammy for Album of the Year with Folklore

Folklore Taylor Swift

Released: July 24, 2020 Peak: 18 US, 13 UK, 13 CN, 14 AU Sales (in millions): 1.04 US, 0.1 UK, 2.05 world (includes US and UK) Genre: pop

Tracks: Song Title (date of single release, chart peaks) Click for codes to singles charts. The 1 (10/9/20, 4 US, 4 AU, 7 CN, 10 UK) Cardigan (7/27/20, 1 US, 1 AU, 3 CN, 6 UK) The Last Great American Dynasty Exile (with Bon Iver) (8/3/20) (6 US, 3 AU, 6 CN, 8 UK, gold single) My Tears Ricochet Mirrorball Seven August This Is Me Trying Illicit Affairs Invisible String Mad Woman Epiphany Betty (8/17/20, 42 US, 22 AU, 32 CN) Peace Hoax Total Running Time: 63:29

Rating: 4.267 out of 5.00 (average of 27 ratings) Quotable: “The first chapter of Swift’s mature second act.” – Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide Awards: (Click on award to learn more).

About the Album: Taylor Swift’s eighth studio album been called “the quintessential quarantine album” and the “first great work of art” from the pandemic. WK The surprise release “blindsided the pop music world,” saving listeners from “their tedious lockdown lives.” WK She announced it via social media 16 hours before its release. Supposedly even her record label wasn’t aware of the album until hours before its launch. WK Swift conceived Folklore as “a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness” out of her imagination. WK She departed from her the usual autobiographical references of previous works to craft stories mostly from a third-person perspective, keying in on themes of “escapism, nostalgia, loneliness, and introspection.” WK Some of the narratives included “a ghost finding its murderer at its funeral, a seven-year-old girl with a traumatized friend, an old widow spurned by her town, recovering alcoholics, and a love triangle between three-fictitious characters.” WK As Taylor said, “these images in my head grew faces or names and became characters. I found myself…writing about or from the perspective of people I’ve never met, people I’ve known, or those I wish I hadn’t.” WK All Music Guide’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine said the songs “are recognizably her work, bearing telltale melodic phrases and a reliance on finely honed narratives that turn on exquisitely rendered lyrical details.” AMG He said that the album feels “not like a momentary diversion inspired by isolation but rather the first chapter of Swift’s mature second act.” AMG Folklore was a musical departure from previous more upbeat pop albums, traversing instead in indie-folk territory. Variety’s Chris Willman said the album was a reminder that Swift was one of the few pop stars willing to experiment with different styles. WK The Guardian’s Laura Snapes called it Swift’s most cohesive and experimental album. WK She worked with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, but also Aaron Dessner, guitarist of indie-rock band the National. She’d gone to one of their concerts in 2019 and he’d told her how the band members lived in different parts of the world, but sent instrumental tracks to their singer. During the quarantine in 2020, Swift decided to adopt the idea and she and Antonoff and Dessner sent digital files of instrumentals and vocals to each other to craft the album. WK Folklore came only 11 months after her 2019 Lover album, her fastest turnaround time between albums. It became her seventh album to top the Billboard charts in the United States. It set the Guinness World Record for the biggest opening day on Spotify for an album by a female artist, became the longest-running #1 since 2017, and became the biggest-selling album of 2020. WK The album’s first single, Cardigan, gave Swift the distinction of being the first act to debut atop the Billboard album chart and Hot 100 singles chart simultaneously. The song was also nominated for a Grammy for Song of the Year. Swift described the song as one that explored “lost romance and why young love is often fixed so permanently in our memories.” WK Another of the singles, Exile, hit the top 10 and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance. The “sentimental, gospel-flavored, indie folk duet with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver” WK was “an unspoken, argumentative conversation between two former lovers.” WK Notes: The deluxe edition added the song “The Lakes.”

Resources and Related Links: DMDB encyclopedia entry for Taylor Swift AMG All Music Guide review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine WK Wikipedia Other Related DMDB Pages: First posted 1/12/2021; last updated 4/30/2022.

Billie Eilish wins Grammy for Album of the Year

When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? Billie Eilish

Released: March 29, 2019 Peak: 13 US, 5 UK, 11 CN, 11 AU Sales (in millions): 3.0 US, 0.3 UK, 4.51 world (includes US and UK) Genre: pop/alternative

Tracks: Song Title (date of single release, chart peaks) Click for codes to singles charts. !!!!!!! (79 CN) Bad Guy (3/29/19, 11 US, 6 A40, 34 AA, 12 MR, 2 UK, 11 CN, 12 AU, worldwide sales: 19.5 million) Xanny (4/13/19, 35 US, 26 CN, 10 AU, worldwide sales: 1.2 million) You Should See Me in a Crown (7/18/18, 41 US, 7 MR, 60 UK, 27 CN, 16 AU, worldwide sales: 2.43 million) All the Good Girls Go to Hell (4/13/19, 46 US, 5 MR, 77 UK, 19 CN, 8 AU, worldwide sales: 1.2 million) Wish You Were Gay (1/30/19, 31 US, 13 UK, 12 CN, 5 AU, worldwide sales: 1.31 million) When the Party’s Over (10/17/18, 29 US, worldwide sales: 5.06 million) 8 (4/13/19, 79 US, 52 CN, 35 AU, sales: ½ million) My Strange Addiction (4/13/19, 43 US, 21 CN, 12 AU, worldwide sales: 1.2 million) Bury a Friend (1/9/19, 14 US, 12 MR, 6 UK, 10 CN, 3 AU, worldwide sales: 3.98 million) Ilomilo (4/13/19, 62 US, 25 MR, 38 CN, 23 AU, worldwide sales: ½ million) Listen Before I Go (4/13/19, 63 US, worldwide sales: 0.7 million) I Love You (4/13/19, 53 US, 35 CN, 20 AU, worldwide sales: 1.2 million) Goodbye (69 CN, 54 AU) Total Running Time: 42:56

Rating: 3.910 out of 5.00 (average of 28 ratings) Quotable: “No teenager I can recall has ever made such an impressive album.” – music critic Robert Christgau Awards: (Click on award to learn more).

About the Album: “Billie Eilish became a teen folk hero with her blockbuster debut — just your average 17-year-old songwriting prodigy with a head full of nightmares.” RS’20 She became the youngest artist in history to receive nominations for the Big Four Grammys. At the 2020 ceremony, she became only the second artist (after Christopher Cross) to win them all – Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Song of the Year (both for “Bad Guy”), and Album of the Year. She also won Best Pop Vocal Album and Best Engineered Album. By this time, she was eighteen, but still the youngest to ever take home the prizes for Record of the Year and Album of the Year. LeAnn Rimes was 14 when she won Best New Artist and Lorde was 17 when she landed Song of the Year for “Royals.” Eilish had already released an EP, but When We All Fall Asleep was her official debut album. It debuted at #1 in the U.S. and UK. She became the youngest solo female act ever to top the charts in the United Kingdom. WK Critic Robert Christgau said, “No teenager I can recall has ever made such an impressive album.” WK She “makes a bold entrance into the mainstream, leaving the fringes behind to embrace her role as an anti-pop star for the disaffected Gen Z masses.” AMG She has said the record, which explores climate change, drug addiction, heartbreak, mental health, and suicide, was inspired by lucid dreams and night terrors. WK Eilish largely co-wrote the album with her brother Finneas O’Connell, who produced it from his bedroom studio in the house where they grew up. His production focused on amplified bass, minimalist percussion, and acoustic sounds. Musically, it has been described as “a youthful, hybrid blend that incorporates elements of indie electronic, pop, and hip-hop.” AMG Exclaim!’s Matt Bobkin said the album displayed “a bold artistic vision and a willingness to move beyond the boundaries of pop conventions.” WK Critics described her vocal style “as soft and whispered;” WK The Daily Telegraph’s Neil McCormick said she could “shift from coquettish to threatening, playfully ironic to emotionally sincere in a breath.” WK He said she “sounds modern and old fashioned at the same time.” WK “Like Lorde’s devilish little sister, Eilish delivers her confessional lyrics in hushed bursts of breath, at times dirge-like in their sedateness and otherwise intensely threatening in their creepiness.” AMG Intro/“Bad Guy” The album kicks off with !!!!!!!, a thirty-second “intro in which Eilish slurps saliva from her Invisalign aligners and announces that ‘this is the album,’ before she and her brother descend into laughter.” WK She follows that with “the whispery trap-pop strut of Bad Guy,” RS’20 using “a bass, a kick-drum and amplified finger snaps.” WK Lyrically, she taunts her partner and suggests she is the “bad guy” and not him. The worldwide #1 hit – the fifth single from the album – was released simultaneously with When We All Fall Asleep. “Xanny” Xanny was inspired by a party where Eilish’s friends were drinking and throwing up and becoming “completely not who they were.” WK It was built around “a jazz-inspired loop in order to replicate the feeling of being ‘in secondhand smoke.’” WK “You Should See Me in a Crown” The “trap-influenced electropop song” WK was inspired by an episode of the BBC TV series Sherlock. Eilish sings over “blaring synths and rapid-fire hi-hats.” WK It was the first single, preceding the release of the album by six months. “All the Good Girls Go to Hell” Stereogum described this as a “punchy piano number” and one of the album’s “poppiest tracks.” WK It explores the notion that God and the Devil are observing humans as a meek group of people and pondering, “What are they trying to do here?” WK “Wish You Were Gay”/“When the Party’s Over” On this “jazzy classic pop song” WK Eilish sings about a man she likes who doesn’t show romantic interest in her. She wishes that he was gay so that it would explain his lack of interest in her. WK In a different vein, the “piano ballad” When the Party’s Over was written when her brother left his date’s house “kind of for no reason.” WK Both songs were top-40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100. “8”/“My Strange Addiction” The album’s eighth song, appropriately titled 8, “is a ukulele-based lullaby which manipulates Eilish's vocals to make her sound like a small child.” WK the bass-heavy My Strange Addiction follows. She got approval from Steve Carrell, B.J. Novak, John Krasinski, and Mindy Kaling to use samples of their voices as featured in the “Threat Level Midnight” episode of the TV sitcom The Office. “Bury a Friend”/“Ilomilo” This was the second-highest charting song from the album, reaching #14. Eilish wrote this tale of “gothic angst” RS’20 from the perspective of what a monster under a bed feels. Musically, the “minimalist electronica and industrial song” WK contains a vocal line resembling the Doors’ “People Are Strange” and a beat similar to Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead.” WK The beat from the song “leads seamlessly into…Ilomilo, an electropop cut named after the 2010 video game.” WK “Listen Before I Go”/“I Love You”/“Goodbye” Finneas explained that the songs are related because they express “different sentiments about a farwell.” WK Eilish sings Listen Before I Go from the perspective of someone about to commit suicide. Eilish said I Love You, whose chorus has drawn comparisons to “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen, was about how “it sucks to be in love sometimes.” WK Goodbye features lines from each of the other songs on the album, except for the intro. Conclusion In the end, this is a remarkable beginning for such a young artist. “She’s a highly relatable kid – not yet of legal voting age at the time of the album’s release – and an avatar for an audience that deals with similar mental health struggles and growing pains.” AMG Notes: The Japanese edition added the tracks “Come Out and Play” and “When I Was Older.” A Japanese limited deluxe edition also added a remix of “Bad Guy” with Justin Bieber and a Japanese complete edition included “Everything I Wanted” as well. A reissue from Target added “When I Was Older,” Bitches Broken Hearts,” and “Everything I Wanted.”

Resources and Related Links: DMDB encyclopedia entry for Billie Eilish AMG All Music Guide review by Neil Z. Yeung RS’20 Rolling Stone (9/22/2020). “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time” WK Wikipedia First posted 12/12/2020; last updated 4/25/2022.

Kacey Musgraves' Golden Hour released

Golden Hour Kacey Musgraves

Released: March 30, 2018 Peak: 4 US, 12 CW, 6 UK, 11 CN, 25 AU Sales (in millions): 1.0 US, 0.06 UK Genre: country

Tracks: (Click for codes to singles charts.) Slow Burn [4:06] (10/16/18, 38 CW, gold single) Lonely Weekend [3:46] Butterflies [3:39] (2/23/18, 32 CW) Oh, What a World [4:01] Mother [1:18] Love Is a Wild Thing [4:16] Space Cowboy [3:36] (2/23/18, 30 CW, gold single) Happy & Sad [4:03] Velvet Elvis [2:34] Wonder Woman [4:00] High Horse [3:33] (6/25/18, 36 CW, gold single) Golden Hour [3:18] Rainbow [3:34] (2/11/19, 98 US, 17 CW, gold single) All songs are co-written by Musgraves. Co-writers include producers Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk as well as Luke Laird, Natalie Hemby, Shane McAnally, Luke Dick, Jesse Frasure, Hillary Lindsey, Amy Wadge, Tommy Schleiter, and Trent Dabbs. Total Running Time: 45:44

Rating: 4.351 out of 5.00 (average of 16 ratings) Quotable: It isn’t “classicist, but perhaps it might be classic.” – Katherine St. Asaph, Spin magazine Awards: (Click on award to learn more).

About the Album: Kacey Musgraves “became Nashville’s most compelling crossover star since Taylor Swift” RS’20 by winning critics over with three previous albums in which she “enlivened traditional country with her sly synthesis of old sounds” AMG and her “clever wordplay and witty turns of phrase about small-town life.” AZ However, she didn’t “fit the standard archetypes for women in country: not a Southern belle like countless ingenues, not a brash spitfire like Miranda Lambert, not a maternal elder like Dolly or Reba.” SP She sang about “homesickness, and falling wildly in love with the witty precision of her earlier small-town polemics” RS’20 but also about “such un-conservative topics topics as gay rights and marijuana” SP and acid trips. That was never more apparent than when she won a Country Music Association Song of the Year award for “Follow Your Arrow.” That song pointed the way for an unconventional country artist who, on her fourth album, Golden Hour, still turns out “classic country constructions” AMG from a writing standpoint, but with music that “doesn’t scan country.” AMG A song like High Horse “gallops along with a Shania Twain conceit and lite disco licks that sound more like pop-radio Pharrell than what one might think of as country.” SP Throughout this album, Musgraves integrates “the smooth grooves of yacht rock and the glitterball pulse of disco” AMG as well as country pop, electropop, and electronica. WK She cited influences from the Bee Gees to Sade to Neil Young. AZ She said, “I’ve always loved Sade, but I also love Dolly Parton…There’s got to be a world where all these things can live together.” RS’20 As Spin magazine’s Katherine St. Asaph said, it isn’t “classicist, but perhaps it might be classic.” SP “Golden Hour’s lush yacht-country production re-envisioned what millennial pop might sound like.” RS’20 Not only did she explore diverse sounds, but she wrote “some of the most honest and genuine tunes of her career.” AZ The album is “warm and enveloping, pitched halfway between heartbreak and healing – but the album lingers in the mind because the songs are so sharp, buttressed by long, loping melodies and Musgraves’ affectless soul baring.” AMG The songs sway “between casual confessions and songs about faded love.” AMG Musgraves said she wrote more love songs for this album as a result of getting married and finding herself “inspired to write about this person and all these things he brought out in me that weren’t there before.” WK Musgraves’ voice “is reminiscent of folkies like Suzanne Vega or Sheryl Crow…it’s not a belting voice, but it’s a remarkable instrument, capable of imbuing with winsom empathy songs like Lonely Weekend and Happy & Sad that might otherwise be tweenish sap.” SP “Even the druggy tracks” SP like Mother and Oh, What a World “approach Disney levels of earnestness.” SP Not only did Golden Hour take home the Country Music Association’s award for Album of the Year, but she landed Grammy gold with awards for Album of the Year and Best Country Album. She also took home Grammys for Best Country Solo Performance and Best Country Song for her first two singles, Butterflies and Space Cowboy, respectively. Notes: The Japanese version of the album included three bonus tracks – “Merry Go ‘Round” and “Follow Your Arrow” from her 2013 Same Trailer, Different Park album and the Violents Remix of “High Horse.”

Review Sources: DMDB Encyclopedia entry for Kacey Musgraves AZ Amazon AMG All Music Guide review by Stephen Thomas Erelwine RS’20 Rolling Stone (9/22/2020). “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time” SP Spin review by Katherine St. Asaph WK Wikipedia Other Related DMDB Pages: First posted 8/17/2020; last updated 4/24/2022.