Tag: 2020

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Best tunes of 2020: #17 Ezra Furman “Every feeling”

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I recently wrapped up watching the final season of Sex Education on Netflix and almost immediately, I found myself wanting to start over and rewatch it from the beginning. To me, that’s a sign of a great show and when it happens with books, it’s the same – the feeling of missing the characters and their stories and their worlds.

I wasn’t immediately sure when I started watching the first season back in the fall of 2019. It felt a bit weird to be watching a show that explicitly detailed the sex lives of teenagers, even though I knew that all of the actors would be of the age of consent. It did a great job, though, playing with reality, making the stories not about their age or the place and time*, and more about the great characters and how they reacted to universal problems and situations related to love and relationships and yes, sex.

The show lasted four seasons of eight episodes a piece, which seems quite long for British television in my own limited experience. Each episode in each season was quite excellent and of course, I loved the music throughout, a pastiche of hip music from the 70s to the present, with many songs that I recognized and some that I didn’t. A quick google search explained that many of those excellent songs I didn’t recognize were supplied by American singer-songwriter Ezra Furman.

In late January 2020, about a week after season 2 appeared on Netlix, Furman released “Sex education original soundtrack”, which collected together all of her songs that appeared in the first two seasons of the show. Of course, I made sure to peruse it and then found myself perusing more of her work and it was then, that I realized that though some of the tracks were written for the show, many were songs that were repurposed from her previous recordings.

One of the tracks that Furman wrote new for the show appeared at the end of episode three of the first season. “Every feeling” fits the mood of scene perfectly: the wind-down of an emotionally draining day. At the time, the song wasn’t available anywhere and viewers  immediately started clamouring to find out where they could get a copy. It’s a short piece that focuses on Furman banging away at her acoustic guitar like it was cause of her hurt and depression and her drained voice shaking out all the f-bombs. Because sometimes that’s the only word that’ll do to get your message across.

“I’m gonna feel every feeling
And only love
Only love will remain”

It’s a track full of pain but it’s also damned uplifting.

*Though there were plenty of homages to John Hughes’ teen comedies of the eighties, the hints to past and present technologies and trends made it feel out of time completely.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2020 list, click here.

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Best tunes of 2020: #18 Bright Eyes “Mariana trench”

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Conor Oberst started out releasing music under the Bright Eyes name way back in 1998, a year after his previous band, Commander Venus, disbanded. It really all began as a solo project, with Oberst bringing in different musicians to help out with recording and live performances, but a trio eventually coalesced, with multi-instrumentalists, Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott rounding things out. They were quite prolific in 2000s, releasing eight studio albums through to the end of that decade, including two (plus a live album) in 2005 alone. After one more album in 2011, the group went on hiatus for nine years before releasing the “Down in the weeds, where the world once was”, the album on which this song appears, in August 2020.

I was quite aware of Bright Eyes and their music throughout most of their pre-hiatus period and even saw them once (perhaps twice, if you count Conor Oberst solo). And though I tried a few times, I could never really get into them. But as I wrote when this last album appeared at number eight on my Best albums of 2020 list, I found a connection here that I didn’t have with Bright Eyes’s previous work. I still haven’t made the time to go back through their previous work to see if I had been wrong about it all along or if it would just be this one album for me. However, I can say that the sentiments with “Down in the weeds” matched my mood and that generality that I witnessed with the few people I was able to relate with in the early days of the pandemic.

“Well, they better save some space for me
In that growing cottage industry
Where selfishness is currency
People spend more than they make”

These are the words that kickstart track four and the fourth single to be released in advance of the album. It’s equally a commentary on the state of things, our commentator’s acknowledgement of his place in it all, and how he’s contributed to it. And yet, as meagre as the words are, the music travels in the other direction, looking instead to raise spirits rather than dampen them. It’s upbeat and catchy, the drums chug along and the bassline dances all around it, and Jessca Hoop’s appearance on backup vocals serves to lighten Oberst’s tone with her harmonies. And I just love the singalong chorus and the way it makes you look at you and me with a knowing smile and a questioning glance.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2020 list, click here.

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Best tunes of 2020: #19 Doves “Prisoners”

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“Hello, old friend
It’s been a while
It’s me again
We’re just prisoners of these times
But it won’t be for long”

For all the horribleness and traumatic change 2020 handed to us throughout its entirety, there was still some good to come out of it. And I’d have to say that somewhere near the top of the list of positives has to be the release of new material by Doves, one of my favourite ever bands.

The Manchester-based trio had just completed a successful run of live dates in the summer of 2019 after eight long years on hiatus. Things were going so well that they pooled together material that frontman Jimi Goodwin had been working on* with the Williams brothers’ as yet unreleased work as Black Rivers, along with some ideas that were leftover from their last album together as a band**, and then, tied it all up with a magical bow. “The universal want” was released in the fall, just in time for yours truly’s birthday, but not before justifiably teasing us all with a couple of excellent advanced singles, one of which is the focus of today’s post.

“Prisoners” and its lyrics may sound like it fits in perfectly with everything that was going on at the time but Goodwin and his bandmates have vehemently denied any connection with the song to the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that were happening all around the world attempting to temper the virus’s spread. They haven’t said if it was one of the songs that had been written beforehand but as they tell it, it follows the same conversation the band has always been having with itself in their songs. “Just over the horizon, there’s always something better. Sometimes we get trapped by our own behaviour. You can be a prisoner of your own thoughts. They can take you to some pretty dark and unexpected places if you let them. It’s a song about checking yourself.”

This song (and the rest of Doves’ newest album) has the group picking up practically where they left off. It’s beautiful and atmospheric and set apart in its own world. It all begins with a light strumming on the guitar and a sprinkling of sunlight and wisps of haze and then that driving drum beat kicks in and the bopping bassline falls in step not far behind. There’s plenty alien and new, but it’s not strange at all. It’s familiar and comforting and fluid and when the guitar starts a-wailing amidst all the glow, you just have to soak it all in, bask in the glory of it all.***

*Which, of course, was supposed to be his sophomore release, the follow up to 2014’s “Odludek”.

**The absolutely incredible “Kingdom of rust”, which was released in 2008.

***These last few sentences are some self-plagiarizing from a post I wrote back in 2020 praising “The universal want” as my favourite album of the year.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2020 list, click here.