The music of St. Lenox has been a huge thing in my world during the past month and now we are finally approaching the release of his gorgeous album Ten Fables of Young Ambition and Passionate Love. The album is due out next Friday on the 28th of September on Anyway Records. The latest single First Date is on the new weekly playlist, but here’s the one from last week companied with another lovely music video. Besides making unique and inspiring pop songs, St. Lenox masters this visual thing equally well. Of course together with the director Elliot Lyman. I hope I manage to write a proper piece about the album during the next few weeks, but meanwhile you can investigate the science of love with the help of this tremendous song/video combo for the album opener Hashtag Brooklyn Karaoke Party.
One of my most anticipated albums for these last months of 2018 is the new Grand Salvo album Sea Glass that will drop into our hearts on the 2nd of November. Paddy Mann from Melbourne, Australia is an extraordinary songwriter and I’m sure this new album will be one of the finest of the year. It will be released by Mistletone. Grand Salvo never plays it safe and the first single from the forthcoming album is this exceptional, epic and beautifully arranged 10 minutes long baroque folk song In The Water. This is so serene, beautiful and devastatingly sad. Incredible song. Listen to In the Water below and check out the latest single on the new weekly playlist that I posted earlier today.
A lovely live version of the same song from On Random TV.
I meant to do a lot more blog stuff this week, but the reality threw a couple of curve balls and I just had to use my energy to fight through the week. Thankfully weekends are still mine and thankfully there’s always new music to hold me. This song Fight from the forthcoming Vanessa Peters album Foxhole Prayers has been my go-to song when it feels like the walls are closing in on me, whether it’s due to miserable world/Finland politics or personal struggles of the everyday life.
Fight is a personal song written from a perspective of a musician temporarily worn down by the music industry and the difficulties of trying to sell and hype your own music. Even though the song is personal, there’s something very universal and relatable in it. It’s a good song to have and to hold close to your heart, because we all need a little bit of encouragement and fighting spirit. Some more often than others. Fight feels relatable to me, because it acknowledges my fears and vulnerabilities and kinda says that hey it’s ok, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do this or that. I have a master’s degree in self-doubt, I’m super shy and quiet, but the last thing I need is to someone overly positive to tell me that I need to be someone who I am not. This song on the other is a good compassionate companion that lets me be the shy, quiet and socially clumsy person that I am. Fight just reminds me that while all that is part of my identity, I shouldn’t let it take too large role and hold me back from achieving my dreams that are worth fighting for. And that those dreams are always within my reach even if there’s a temporary hiccup in my happiness. That works.
Foxhole Prayers is out on October 5th of Idol Records.
Hurray for One Chord to Another. This little thing is now 17 years old. Of course this so-called blog birthday is hardly a reason for a big celebration, because it’s pretty much just showcasing my insanity, resilience, passion and stubborness. It would be easy to argue that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to spend 17 years and hundreds and hundreds of hours in something that pays absolutely nothing and doesn’t really have a whole lot of significance either. Especially because it’s been a continuous struggle to keep this labour of love project alive in the midst of the realities of the everyday life. In some ways things like these are definitely more suitable for the studying days when the dayjobs aren’t hanging over one’s shoulder draining away all the time and energy. I seriously thought about quitting for years, but fuck all that. I love this. This matters to me, this is a significant part of who I am and I’m somewhat proud of doing this for such a ridiculously long time and at the moment I don’t have any desire to quit. This has given me way more than I could ever had hoped for. I’ve met so many lovely warm-hearted people from all over the world both online and in person and many of them have become dear friends.
All this might change and I don’t give any definite promises. I’m sure there will be times when the everyday life throws more curve balls than what I can hit and I just don’t have what it takes to update frequently. The introduction of the weekly playlist seems like a good thing at the moment, because even though they are hardly viral, making it every week adds some much needed rhythm and structure to the blog. During the years I’ve come to realize that it’s so easy to let things slide and so hard to start again. A writing break so easily just carries on and on, because after a while there’s dozens of new songs and thousands of unread emails and you don’t even know where to start again and therefore things just slide and the situation only gets worse. So even though, it may sound rather strange, for me writing this continuosly seems to be far easier than taking some weeks off and then be completely overflowed with the amount of new music. This way I will do at least one post every week and it also encourages me to do other posts, because I don’t want this to become just a playlist thing.
A couple of things I’ve considered are trying to give interviews a go and dropping or changing the subtitle ”A Finnish Pop Site”. Nothing might come out off either. Maybe some kind of Q&A type of thing might not be that hard, but it’s difficult to find a unique or even remotely interesting angle. So self-doubt might be too strong for that. The problem with the Finnish Pop Site subtitle is just that it gives a bit wrong impression and therefore might not be a good thing. After all, this is closer to an americana blog these days. But sure, I’ve gotten a bit too attached to it during the years (even though it was a little different for a little while), so I might not have the heart to change it.
I think that’s enough of pointless yearly ramblings. I think I owe a beer to anyone who read all of this. But hey, I have to share some music with the seven people who read this far. After all, this blog has nothing to do with music critique, but it has everything to do with loving music passionately. So here’s a couple of songs from the album that I’ve loved the most during this current year. This is The Lonesomest Sound That Can Sound by Clay Parker and Jodi James. Such a brilliant record from this folk duo from Louisiana. They also have musical role on Blaze, the new 2018 movie about the legendary songwriter Blaze Foley.
