And yes, I know. This has become a very British week. I'M SORRY. I DIDN'T MEAN IT.
But Olivia Dean has been getting a huge ton of attention in the last few months because of this song- which is a soulful and joyful highlight of her debut album and it makes me happy to know she's performing this weekend at the Grammys.
There's nothing really ground-breaking about the song - Londonbeat were - and are - a dance-pop group who wrote a huge hit single that became a worldwide hit in 1990. From their second album In The Blood, it was their biggest hit by FAR.... but they were NOT a one-hit wonder, as their followup single was also a pretty solid hit song. It was written by the group - which was pretty typical for them.
The song, however, WAS a sensation, and it was unescapable. And now, you're singing it, too. As you should be - it's a fun, sweet song.
I did mention that Londonbeat are still together, and they are - and they still perform live. Here they were in 2023, STILL singing the hell out of their biggest song.
The Butterfly Lounge was a nightclub in Orange County, California. It closed in 2014 after a short run, and left a cultural impact. It was known to be a size acceptance club, where skinny women were turned away.
It also wasn't classy. It was next to a highway and smelled of sweat and stale beer. But that was part of its charm!!
MIKA - the stage name of Michael Holbrook Penniman Jr.- happened to be flying to Los Angeles and, the night before his flight, he couldn't sleep. So he turned on Channel 4 and saw a documentary in the middle of the night about The Butterfly Lounge, which he thought was spectacular. So, he wrote the song THAT NIGHT.
He wrote the song because Victoria Wood went to the Butterfly Lounge.
Released as a single in 2007, it was a UK hit - and got a mixed reception because, well, something something making the world go 'round.
So, from his debut album, Life In Cartoon Motion, here's MIKA.
You know, MIKA had a new album out last week. Hyperlove. Go listen to it. It's pretty good.
That doesn't mean he doesn't perform this very fun song live, still. This performance is from 2023.
Of course the crowd loves it.
And of course he still holds the Butterfly Lounge in high regard.
Also, I LOVE that he's got the balls to go right into the crowd.
"Holding Back The Years" was NOT a song for teenage me. It was too mature, and I didn't enjoy it.
Looking back at their whole catalogue, I can see now how good Mick Hucknall's voice and understanding of soul really was (is, I suppose. He's not dead).
This 1991 song - from Simply Red's 4th album of the same name - reached #44 in the US - the last time the band reached the Billboard Hot 100. It was a much bigger hit in Europe, where Simply Red continued to have hits.
The song was written by Mick Hucknall and is an upbeat pop-soul song.
You know, Simply Red is still around - I mean, it's Mick Hucknall that really embodies who the band is and what they are all about.
Speaking of Merge Records, let's talk about a 2025 signing.
This isn't a band from North Carolina, though. They're from Chicago, Illinois and they make alt-country music. The band consists of vocalist Casey Walker, guitarist Max Subar, bassist Jason Ashworth, fiddle player Scott Daniel, and drummer Spencer Tweedy. Put a pin in that drummer. We'll come back to him.
They released their debut album, Last Missouri Exit, in 2025. This song was written by Casey Walker - the vocalist - and produced by Spencer Tweedy - the drummer.
If that drummer's last name looks familiar, it should. His dad's name is Jeff and they had a band together called Tweedy. I think Jeff was in another band, but I don't remember. Anyway, Spencer has been in bands since he was 13 (he was 18 or 19 when he did Tweedy with his dad) and brings a maturity to Case Oats that serves them well.
Also, Casey Walker is a hell of a country vocalist and she's going to go far.
UNCLE TUPELO! That's it!
Anyway, here's what is essentially a solo acoustic performance of the song by Casey Walker at Rough Trade. It's a great highlight for her voice and shows that she's more than a vocalist.
I was talking to Courtney about Superchunk one night recently - recalling a post about a Kay Hanley cover of a Superchunk classic - and she told me that she didn't know who they were.
So, given that I was lucky enough to see the lo-fi Chapel Hill, NC natives live in 1995, in Hartford CT - at Lollapalooza - I figured it was high time that I posted something they did.
I felt the best way to represent them would not be a current song - because they're still making great music - but rather an older one, from their 1997 Indoor Living album. This was released on the Merge Records label, which has been the home of Superchunk since the late 1980s..... but also, Mac McCaughan, the vocalist for Superchunk, owns Merge Records, so that's probably a big reason why.
The song, written by the band, is a light lo-fi pop-rock sound that is really excellent and engaging. The video is SUPER high tech.
Yes, the band is still around and still making music.... and they still perform the songs of their early days. Here they are in Carrboro, NC - which is literally next to Chapel Hill. It's like they're the same town.
Anyway, I think they sound better now. And I look forward to what comes next.
I know what you're all thinking if you don't live in Wales.
Who the hell is Don Leisure?
Don Leisure is the winner of the 2025 Welsh Music Prize, for his album Tyrchu Sain. In English, the title literally means "sound tunnelling" and that's what he's doing - building beautiful tunnels of sound and burrowing into them - laying acoustic guitars and folk sounds with electronics and modern music.
This song - which translates to "light a fire" - is a highlight of the album for me. Leisure is joined by longtime Pretender Carwun Ellis on this one, as well as a couple of samples you are certain to recognize if you are huge Welsh music fans (I didn't know them).
The Sundays made trippy dream-pop music and made it for a masses that wasn't ready for them.
This song, which was never released as a single per se but was their first real video released to MTV in the United States, was my introduction to them. Their whole Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic album, released in early 1990, was an eye-opener and changed my musical fandom forever.
They broke up in 1998, but starting in 2014, there started to be some rumblings that there would be a return. It has not yet materialized, but I am hopeful.
They did perform live an awful lot, and this show from 1997 - where they beautifully performed the song - is one of my favorites. Harriet Wheeler's voice is full of a lot of passion that is far more apparent in this live setting.
This may be one of the weirdest collaborations of all time.
Max Headroom was a digital character played by Matt Frewer, meant to be some sort of a digital presenter or talk show host or something. He's hard to explain. However, he was everywhere at a certain point of the 1980s.He had a British talk show. He sold New Coke after the return of Coke Classic.
Art of Noise was an avant-garde noise experimentation electronic group that got a little bit of attention from MTV and finally hit the US top 40 with this weird collaboration with a digital talk show host.
The song, written by Art of Noise with a title that is a mashup of "paranoia" and "insomnia", is weird early electronica.... and somehow, it just worked.
The song was remixed in 1989 by Ben Liebrand for a greatest hits album for the band. It lacks the Max, but doesn't leave out the electronica.
Despite being a very electronic group, they did perform live, like this performance from Tokyo in 1986. I personally find it interesting how they could create future beats live on instruments like they did.
It's mid-January and I'm still struggling to write 2026 on my posts.
Anyway, I felt like going with an underappreciated follow-up single. You see, Sinead O'Connor was best known for "Nothing Compares 2 U", her megahit Prince cover.
However, she didn't stop releasing singles. This one, the single that followed, was not a cover at all, but rather, written and produced by Sinead O'Connor herself. Outside of the US, this was a huge pop hit - and in the US, it made a splash on modern rock radio and made a ripple at pop radio.
It should have been a bigger hit here. It wasn't, because it was an angry song, odd for its both acoustic and electric guitar backing tracks. The song is a harder-edged pop-rock song trying to appeal to an audience who wanted another Prince ballad.
Which is a shame. Because this song is straight fire.
And when this song was released as a single, she was 23 and singing THIS hard.
You can see her performing the song with an acoustic guitar with a similar hard edge in 1990.
She's arguably coming off even angrier live.
If you want my PERSONAL favorite performance of this song, it's this much quieter but just as angry one from 2010.
You can hear every single lyric. I want you to listen to this one and feel every single word.
That doesn't mean she lost her edge. In this Parkpop performance from 2013, she's back to louder and harder - and angry.
But also, happier. And the crowd loves her.
This show is from 2020, and was one of her very last shows, as her tour would be shut down less than a week later thanks to the pandemic. She would literally only perform this song four more times before the abrupt end of the tour.
She still had every last bit of emotion and left it all on that stage.
Well, she released a pretty fantastic album called Rhinestone Requiem in 2025, her first in three years. It's fun and POSSIBLY my favorite country album of 2025 (that Tyler Childers album was next level great but so was this one).
Anyway, I also just find Sunny Sweeney to be delightful, so I figured I'd post this very strange song about marriage, written by Sweeney, Buddy Owens and Galen Griffin.
Of COURSE I found a live performance of this song. OF COURSE I did. And like I said, I think she's delightful!
It's really not all that common for a band's first song to be their biggest hit.
Unless they're a one hit wonder.
Third Eye Blind is NOT a one hit wonder.
No, their lead vocalist - Stephan Jenkins - wrote a hell of a killer hook that was easy to remember as an homage to "Walk On The Wild Side".
What materialized was a pretty solid pop-rock hit that grew out of modern rock radio and straight to pop radio. It was one that Jenkins didn't initially want to release as the band's debut single - he felt other songs were more representative.
I think it worked out OK for them.
So what made me think about Third Eye Blind after literally thirty years?
Let God Sort Em Out, the 2025 comeback release by a reunited Clipse, was hailed as one of the best albums of the year - and rightly so. It's lyrically deep and has fantastic flow. Produced by Pharrell Williams, this is likely to be a big Grammy winner this year.
This was the first song written for the album, and they got Kendrick to send 'em a verse while he was working on GNX. Lenny Kravitz plays guitar on the track, and of course, Pusha T and Malice are spittin' rhymes with Kendrick.
The title refers to chains - as in jewelry - and whips - as in fast automobiles - but they know what they're doing when it comes to double entendre. And they're quite biting when it comes to criticizing others for chasing dollars.
By the way, Kendrick's verse is about Drake, not Donald Trump - but that should surprise no one. Pusha T's, in fact, is directed towards Jim Jones - no, not the Jonestown guy! - for taking Drake's side in that feud.
It didn't take long for the fans to learn every word.... and when Kendrick came out with them live to perform the song, it was far from culturally inappropriate.
When they perform it without Kendrick, it still is not culturally inappropriate.
A lot of people thought Jerry Garcia was the heart of the Grateful Dead, and he was. Bob Weir was a huge part of the Grateful Dead's success, and a lot of their better known songs, like this one from their hit In The Dark album, were sung and composed by Weir. This one, loosely based on "Ring Around The Rosie", featured lyrics by John Perry Barlow.
After Garcia's death, Weir kept a lot of the heart and music of the Dead alive, with several Dead-adjacent projects, like The Other Ones, The Dead and Dead and Co.
Weir was diagnosed with cancer in 2025, and he beat it. Unfortunately, the underlying lung issues were too much, and his family announced his passing on Saturday,
While the Dead were still touring, this song - which was from the mid-1980s - quickly became a favorite. Here they are performing it in Oakland, near their home base.
And here is Weir, with Dead and Company, keeping the legacy and this song alive.
Their 2025 album Getting Killed is topping a lot of year-end best-of lists.
I listened to it. It's good.
It did not make my Wicked 25 or even the honorable mentions. I just.... it was good. I liked it.
A lot of the attention on Geese's album was driven by Cameron Winter's 2024 solo album, Heavy Metal, which did better than expected (and appeared on a few 2025 lists because it came out in December 2024, too late for a lot of those lists). I have not listened to that one yet.
But, I *did* like Getting Killed. One of the highlights of the album for me is this song, which is post-punk crooning perfection - about a guy trying to convince a reluctant partner. With lyrics by Winter and music by the whole band, it really does tell a story all inside itself.
Live, the melancholy song sounds even sadder, with Winter's baritone selling the emotion.
Now, not only do I need the œ on my clipboard, I have to do an accented e as well!
Adèle Castillon is worth it, though. She started her career in 80's nostalgia as 1/2 of Videoclub, but in 2021, she stuck off on her own.....
And, in 2024, she released Crèvecœur, following it up in February 2025 with an EP called..... Crèvecœur. It was absolutely part of the same project, and together, they make an album that tells a story of heartbreak and reaction....
This song, which leads the collection and still leans into the 80's nostalgia, is accompanied by an animated video that tells a story, too.
Adèle Castillon and Matthieu Reynaud have solo careers now, but they were in an electronic duo called VIDEOCLUB before that.
They were also in a relationship with each other but they are no longer in that relationship.
Those two items are related.
But when you see this video, know that these two musicians were very much in love.
And this is a love song - co-written by the duo and Esteban Capron - that sounds like it could be from 1983, and yet it's from 2018.
This live performance is from 2019, two years before the breakup. I just want to point out how well Adèle just OWNS the stage. Also, you can see it's just two musicians creating all this sound.
The reason I wanted to point that out....
Here's Adèle - who toured alone as VIDEOCLUB until the end in 2021 - performing this song NOT as VIDEOCLUB but as Adèle.... in 2025.
Also, the crowd knows the words.
In fact, this performance from 2021 by VIDEOCLUB came three months AFTER their announced breakup.... and it's just Adèle front and center.
By the way, Mattyeux is the new stage name of Matthieu Reynaud and he tried to do a version of this song....
It's just lacking...... and incomplete.
By the way, he also attaches the VIDEOCLUB name to his solo stuff on Spotify to this day.
On the other hand, Adèle absolutely owns the song.
It's a pretty well known fact that I don't love jazz.
At all.
So when a vocalist comes that makes me really enjoy jazz and makes me repeat their album, it's a big deal.
Laufey is that artist.
And the Grammy-award winning artist - who is nominated for a Grammy this year for her fantastic A Matter of Time album - did that TWICE for me in 2025 - once with A Matter of Time, and once with A Very Laufey Holiday. They are BOTH great albums.
This single is a highlight for me - a story of real love (co-written by the artist and producer/collaborator Spencer Stewart) where it's OK to make dirty jokes with your lover. The video was shot on 35mm film to give it a cinematic feel that matches the song.
Of COURSE she performs it live. And her huge voice matches perfectly with the large Guggenheim performance space (and yes, she's really playing guitar, too).
And, watching this performance, it feels less jazzy and more rock-and-roll throwback.
You knew we had to get to this viral song about smoking at some point, right?
Well, what you didn't know is that, as part of my 1000 albums project, I listened to a Princess Chelsea album - 2023's Taite Music Prize-winning Everything Is Going To Be Alright. It was really, really excellent, and I loved the album. I was seeking a Princess Chelsea song to post.
Taite Music Prize - it's for music from New Zealand. Chelsea Nikkel, who is the titular Princess, is from Auckland.
And, unrelated, the kids started getting obsessed with this creepy, weird song from 2011 that is also enchanting. That song, as it turns out, is from Princess Chelsea's 2011 debut album Lil Golden Book. THAT album is now on my list.
The song is literally a couple arguing about smoking.
The Lee Hazelwood part (to Chelsea's Nancy Sinatra) of the song was sung by Chelsea's co-producer and former Brunettes frontman Jonathan Bree (she was also a part-time member). And it's now on repeat.
So, despite this being a 2011 song, and despite Princess Chelsea releasing a lot of music in between 2011 and... now..... she did not tour the United States until 2023 - in support of Everything Is Going To Be Alright.
