I have been blessed and lucky enough to become close friends with them both, and from them learned a few books worth of world knowledge, and a new found love for creating sounds. I chose to start with DD because after 13 years of them remaining my absolute favorite creators of sound (of music), they also seem to remain, in my eyes, of all the world’s song writers, the ones that put more thought and care into what they create than anyone I have at least ever met, heard, or read about. It's a very diverse list of music, and Steve had a lot of interesting stuff to say, and he connects dots between some of these artists in ways you might not have expected.ĭISCO DOOM (the band, as a whole, but also more specifically Anita and Grabriele) Vocalist Steve Hartlett spoke to us over email about the music that inspired it, and it includes everything from Frankie Valli to Bjork to Todd Rundgren to R&B singer Ari Lennox to Japanese hip hop producer Nujabes to 1930s jazz singer Mildred Bailey to bossa nova pioneer Laurindo Almeida to the early 1900s French composer Maurice Ravel, as well as a couple of Ovlov's peers. The album channels the same '90s indie rock vibe that their previous records do, but '90s indie rock isn't the only thing influencing this new album. "Ovlov have been the biggest band in the world to me since around 2009 and I’m glad everyone else is catching up," Speedy Ortiz's Sadie Dupuis said in a recent Stereogum feature on the band.
It's their first in three years, and the band's stature has only risen in the time since their last LP. Listen to these songs for long enough, though, and you’ll start hearing it too.This Friday (11/19), Connecticut indie rockers Ovlov will return with their new album Buds. The similarities we’re talking about here are more theoretical than anything else, a piece of magical thinking for pop fans who enjoy reading into their favorite records.
(Go listen to Melodrama again if you want to hear more songs with that kind of high-contrast emotional vividness.) To be clear, there’s no evidence that Swift has ever heard or thought much about this song or Don Henley - not unless you count the line about her Eagles T-shirt on “Gold Rush.” And there wouldn’t be anything wrong if she had. Swift’s friend Lorde is a big fan - she once called that line about the voices outside love’s open door “the most incredible fucking question of the universe,” and she wasn’t wrong. “The Heart of the Matter” is a classic that any pop songwriter would be proud to claim as an influence. Henley wonders “how I lost me, and you lost you” Swift admits, “I’d like to be my old self again, but I’m still trying to find it.”īoth songs have killer bridges that dial up the intensity that the verses keep carefully under control: Swift calls out her ex for being “so casually cruel in the name of being honest,” Henley shoots back with “You keep carrying that anger, it’ll eat you up inside, baby.” Henley’s narrator stumbles eloquently toward some kind of understanding in the chorus: “I think it’s about forgiveness.” Taylor knows that’s not how any of this works. “What are these voices outside love’s open door/Make us throw off our contentment and beg for something more?”). “There we are again when I loved you so, back before you lost the one real thing you’ve ever known”) with more poetic questions about what went wrong (“And did the twin flame bruise paint you blue?/Just between us, did the love affair maim you too?” vs. Both of them alternate plainspoken honesty (“I’m learning to live without you now, but I miss you sometimes” vs. Both songs are about wrestling with an old experience you wish you could forget, trying to bring the past into harmony with the present and not always succeeding. They could almost be two halves of one story, two people trying to piece together the same emotional puzzle. The more you listen to them side by side, the more “All Too Well” and “The Heart of the Matter” start to sound like they’re in conversation with each other.