Episode 14 – “It’s just a story I don’t believe. Full of plot holes and constant monotony”

Welcome to Songs That Don’t Suck with your host, Mark Bradbourne.

What’s up everybody? Welcome back to Songs That Don’t Suck, episode 14. My name is Mark and I am your host as always. Let’s get into it.

I’ve got a theory about music, one of many. But I was reading an article and it stated that there is estimated 100,000 songs released every day to streaming platforms. The article basically said that it’s too much and I agree. At that pace, you’re losing all originality it seems and the odds of having some sort of copyright infringement due to chord progressions or even lyrics, it’s going to start to get really staggering. And since I’ve said since the beginning of this podcast, there’s a lot of crap being released but I never would have guessed 100,000 songs a day. I suppose that there will always be small pockets of people who enjoy each and every song that is released, you know, their friends, their family, people who happen to find it. But Jesus, how do you find that? And I guess the problem is that the chance of actually reaching mass appeal becomes eroded by this vast expanse of music. And I’m using that term with giant air quotes because you know how I feel about the vast majority of the stuff that’s getting released. Finding a song that has that mass appeal that might have staying power or a broad potential fan base, that’s a daunting task. Hell, it was daunting even before we had streaming platforms. But now it’s easier to post a song on a streaming platform than it is to breathe some days. Nowadays, finding those songs that have that mass appeal, it’s going to take an act of God, whatever God you follow.

The other problem that I’m finding as I look more and more into this is genres. The way that music is classified these days is getting ridiculous. Some things get mislabeled, like as I’m listening to the playlists to review, things are being labeled as rock that are just not rock. But there is such a granularity happening with the labels that are being attached to songs that searching by genre is damn near impossible. I was thinking about this on my way back from Washington, D. C. I was driving over the weekend and back in the day when you would walk into a record store, you’d go to the rock section or the pop section and you’d go find the artist alphabetically. No problem. Now, I’m a data person, as I’ve mentioned on the show before. And when I got home, I went and pulled some genre data from Spotify. And it was basically covering releases from 1950 through 2000. Any guesses how many genres now fall under pop? 41. Panic at the disco and the Beach Boys were listed under Baroque Pop. Do we really need that? Seriously? Under the rock category, there were 25. Classic Canadian rock. Do we have to carve it out that deeply? That genre in this particular data set had one artist a lot of miles. And I don’t think that’s where I would stick her because Canadian is not the first thing I think about her. So it just seems a bit excessive. Do we really need Hozier in an Irish singer-songwriter category? Is singer-songwriter enough? Alicia Keys was listed under Hip Pop. I’d actually never even heard of that genre before. It’s excessive. And maybe I’m old guy yelling at clouds. I’m old guy telling you to get off my lawn. Whatever it is, I feel like these artists are making it up to try and differentiate themselves in a field of millions and millions of identical sheep. Maybe just release good music instead of trying to come up with a smart label that might have some search engine optimization potential. Ugh. All right. I’m off my soapbox now.

Hey, it is the first show of April and that means top five. We actually had a definitive top three, which I’m going to share with you here. Coming in at number three was Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze. Number two was Coldplay with Yellow. And number one was Purple Rain by Prince. I want to thank everybody for submitting their songs to the top five. And with that, I want to tell you that the top five feature of the podcast is coming to an end. A friend and listener of the show sent me some feedback on the whole top five concept. And while I don’t think this was his intention, I’ve decided to shelve the segment based on what he said. Now when I do a call for songs based on the theme, the majority of songs that get sent in are songs that people know. So the process really isn’t introducing people to new music. I’m pretty sure everybody listening has heard Prince’s Purple Rain. And the whole point of this podcast is to expose you to things that you probably haven’t heard. So for now, this will be the last top five and I’m going to give something else a try.

That something else has to do with covers.

Now I personally hate cover bands and Cleveland is infected with them. It’s a nasty, nasty disease that we have. But I love artists who do cover songs that I don’t really expect. Many times these end up on soundtracks or years ago they would end up on B-sides of singles. So unless you were a really deep fan, you probably weren’t hearing them. So I’ve amassed a lot of these songs over the last couple of years and I’m going to start sharing them here on the podcast. Now to kick off this new segment, I’m going to share with you a very recent find because it’s an album that just came out. The song being covered is Warpigs and Warpigs has been covered by more artists than I can think of. I can think of a cake version of it, Faith No More did a version of it. This particular copy is from an artist who is a hip hop star. His entire career was basically built through the use of autotune. That artist is T-Pain and as I’ve said before in the podcast, that man can sing. T-Pain actually released an entire album of covers just recently and it has anything from country to crooner classics to metal gods and pop rock royalty. It’s a trip honestly. The album is called On Top of the Covers if you want to hear more. It’s fantastic. So each week I am going to share one of these really obscure covers with you. If you’ve got one that you want to share, hit the website up at songsthatdon’tsuck. net and send it to me.

Let’s get into new music this week. You know the drill. I listen to a bunch of new music. Most of it sucks. The ones that don’t end up here on the podcast. Let’s talk about the first song this week. It comes from the Beths and it’s called Watching the Credits. The Beths are from New Zealand and it’s funny. British artists do a really good job of hiding their accents. Like if you listen to Adele sing and then you hear her talking in an interview, your brain probably makes one of those record scratch noises and you’re confused for a hot second. Like how does that deep accent have such a pure singing voice? And it’s just got like one of those really cool phenomenon. But on my initial listen, I didn’t hear anything peculiar with the Beths, but when I started looking into them, I saw they’re from New Zealand and then I listened again and I could immediately start picking out certain words that couldn’t hide their origin and I’m like, oh, how did I miss that the first time? It was really cool. Anyway, I really dig this song and this is one of the few modern songs that I have heard recently that actually has a key change towards the end. Such a nice feature that just has died in music. I was really excited when it did that. I love the overall kind of composition and orchestration with the song. It’s really interesting to listen to and it keeps me hooked specifically as a musician because there’s some really cool things happening. This track comes off of their new album, Expert in a Dying Field, which I just love the title of that. So go check out the Beths.

The second song this week comes from the Gospel Youth and it’s called Good Days. The Gospel Youth are from the UK and this is just a good high quality rocker. Not much else I can really say about it. It’s got a super solid hook with the chorus and from a drummer’s perspective, there are some really tasty things happening. So if you’re the drummer of the Gospel Youth and you’re hearing this, bravo, my friend. I was really impressed with some of the really cool touches that you had going on. They have releases dating back to 2014, but according to their bio, there’s been some ups and downs with the band. This sounds like maybe there was a hiatus or a breakup of some description. I did a quick sample of some of the early stuff going back and all really solid. So if you dig this track, go ahead and check out the rest of the catalog. You might find yourself with a new favorite band in the Gospel Youth.

Third song this week comes from Hana Eid and I apologize, Hana, if I’m slaughtering your last name. The song is called Shrapnel. Hana is based out of Nashville. As I was clicking through her social pages in her Spotify profile, I noticed that her Facebook link actually went to her personal Facebook page where you could add her as a friend rather than an artist page, which you could like and follow. I’ve found this really endearing and I don’t know why. It made me wonder, like, is she really just getting started, you know, doing music part time and just in the process of trying to make it living in Nashville, which would make complete sense. I looked a little deeper. She appears to be unsigned from what I can find and I love the fact that she’s fallen out of my radar. She’s been releasing music since 2021 and the stuff I sampled was really good. I love her voice. It’s got a really cool quality to it. Everything is self-written and it looks to be self-produced. So bravo, Hana. I really appreciate what you’re doing and hopefully the folks listening did too.

I want to take a moment to remind you to like, follow, and share the podcast. Songs That Don’t Suck continues to grow and it is thanks to you who are doing these things and I really appreciate it. On Mondays, the full version comes out and that has the music embedded in it. It is exclusively on Spotify. On Wednesdays, I have the Cliff Note version, which is all the words but none of the songs. I mentioned the website earlier, SongsThatDontSuck. net. It’s got all the places where you can send recommendations of songs. You can find show transcripts. You can find links to all of the things, including social media. I am on Twitter. I am on Instagram. I am on Facebook. Feel free to follow me there. Most of my activity happens on Twitter, including sharing songs that don’t happen to make the podcast.

All right, fourth song this week comes from Kara Jackson and it’s called Pawn Shop. So I’ve been flirting with this song for probably about four weeks. When it first came out, I listened to it and I was like, oh, this is really cool. But other songs just kind of trumped it a little bit and I was like, oh, I want to keep it to five. I want to keep it to five. And this week I was finding like, you know what? I need to share this song because I dig it. It’s really grown on me. Kara’s voice has this really beautiful, smoky quality to it and she’s a former Youth Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2020. She is from Illinois and she released her first EP back in 2019. This is just a really mellow track. I can see how she was a poet laureate. Some of the imagery that she creates with the lyrics are really just profound to me, especially like shiny, like a new tattoo, like that I can immediately see what she was talking about. But anyway, I hope you dug that one. That was Kara Jackson and songs called Pawn Shop.

The fifth and featured track this week comes from Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors and it’s called Find Your People. This is another song that I have been flirting with for the last couple of weeks and I first became aware of Drew Holcomb with his collaborations with Johnnyswim and always been kind of a tangential fan of his, but this song, it kind of finally struck me with kind of its positive message that it is speaking. This past week I spent in Washington, D. C. , it was spring break, so the whole family was there and we toured the African American Museum, the Holocaust Museum and the American Indian Museum among other things. All of these are Smithsonian properties and they’re all fantastic if you happen to be in D. C. , but they’re all museums kind of dedicated as the wrong word, but you know what I’m talking about, like these marginalized, criticized, persecuted, enslaved groups, they always found their strength within themselves and within their community. To steal the lyric, they found their people, so to speak. They are their people, right? So this song like took on a little special meeting for me this week as it was just kind of very reflective of the week that I had and the things that I had been exposed to during the week, which were all fantastic things and very educational, so there’s my tourist D. C. plug. If you want to go to D. C. , definitely go check out all of the Smithsonian projects, but those museums in particular were fantastic. So I hope you find your people.

With that, thank you for listening and I hope you have a great week.

Thanks for listening and until next week, keep searching for and listening to songs that don’t suck.