Dreaming Human

Mellow out under the Kamani tree with Johnson

The palm tree and sunny weather vibe of Jack Johnson invokes memories of mellow tunes on the radio of a friend’s car after another day of navigating the perplexing ocean of high school.

Listening to the same 2005 album “In Between Dreams” that played on the airwaves carries more feeling on a vinyl. Johnson’s already calming tones increase, filling the room with a peaceful atmosphere.

Leave it to Johnson to fit the ukulele, banana pancakes and rain into one song that sounds as smooth as raindrops trickling down a window.

“I’ve always pictured that I’d just get mellower and mellower and then I’d eventually just kind of be doing straight forward acoustic folk stuff as I get older. It’s funny how this one ended up being more upbeat. I don’t know how that happened,” Johnson told Glide Magazine’s Jack Spilberg in a February 2005 interview.

Even in “Staple It Together,” a song focused primarily on the stabbing of a moment by a brown thumbtack from a “prisoner of his own past” who “shot his own future in the foot”, Johnson keeps the tune upbeat. Although the bricks of the lyrics only increase in messiness and admit “hate is such a strong word”, it makes for an easy dance song.

In “Never Know”, Johnson sings about imagery and turning the page, “reading the story again and again and again.” This line reflects the entire album, in which every tune is a story.

The theme is reflected in the cover art, a bright yellow of the sun that depicts a figure carrying a guitar, who stretches out a hand to a dark and partially opened tree.

Lasting less than two minutes, Johnson also serenades in French during “Belle” that draws one to a Parisian corner and the city’s street musicians.

However, he ends the song by saying in French that he does not understand the language he is speaking in, so the other person should “speak to him in another way.”

He asks where all the “good people” went, why he must always play the fool, and speaks to a dissatisfaction with the media still prevalent in the society of today.

“[T]here’s songs where I’m talking about how I turn on the TV and maybe get a little annoyed with seeing someone getting beat up on the street or something and there’s really no need to watch it. It’s just sensationalism and it pulls you in, so I guess the other theme is just kind of being annoyed at media or TV or entertainment,” Johnson told Spilberg.

Hawaiian native Johnson began surfing at an early age and hit the professional stage by his adolescence. An injury led to finding his talent in guitar, which would result in music that sounds like the kind of music that pays homage to Johnson’s home state and alternate surfing career.

He enrolled at the University of California in Santa Barbara, tripling his talents while studying film, creating documentaries and continuing to work on his music.

“Brushfire Fairytales” debuted in 2001, originally gaining fans in the college crowd and then finding its footing among other fans of the pop genre.

His third album, “In Between Dreams”, garnered a nomination for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance at the Grammy Awards.

In addition to his music, Johnson is active in various environmental and social causes.

“All the music I grew up on, the bands had things to say besides just in the songs. That’s why I was interested in them, because the songs were one vehicle they had to share ideas. When I’d go to their concerts and things I would learn about some new path they’d take me down, a new trail that was inspiring. So I try to emulate that same thing that all of my favorite musicians had done for me,” Johnson told a reporter of Music Times in November 2014.

The album’s final piece, “Constellations”, succeeds in showing Johnson’s passion, speaking to skipping stones and a sunset followed by a moonrise to “lay down underneath the stars, listen to Papa’s translations of the stories across the sky.”

The Strokes prove they’re still kicking twenty years later in “The New Abnormal”

They were the band of the noughties, the one many music fans believed had split until their performance at 2019 Lollapalooza and a Bernie Sanders rally earlier this year.

They make “Bad Decisions,” share an “Ode to the Mets” and wonder “Why Are Sundays So Depressing.”

The Strokes return older and wiser in the aptly-titled “The New Abnormal.”

In “Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus,” despondent lyrics search for new friends “but they don’t want me.” The former friends may be stuck in the past, as the singer asks where the eighties bands went.

“Ode to the Mets” tries to hold on to the “old times,” but realizes old friends long forgotten and old ways at the bottom must be released.

The album flashes back to Moscow in 1972 during “Bad Decisions”, deciding “I will leave it in my dreams.” 

Although “Bad Decisions” seems primarily a love song (or an anti-love song,) it is possible that “Pick up your gun / Put up your glove / Save us from harm / Safe or alone” refers to the May 22, 1972 Moscow summit between President Richard Nixon and Soviet leaders.

It was at this meeting that Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, which “limited the United States and the USSR to 200 antiballistic missiles each.”

Given lead singer Julian Casablancas’ deep interest in politics and his own Nixon mention in an interview, “Bad Decisions” is undoubtedly a song that carries a double entendre: disparaging a broken relationship while simultaneously analyzing the Summit and its impact.

The vinyl provides a velvety sound of “The New Abnormal” that is missing from the Spotify version.

In record form, it comes with a cover that transforms into a magnificent poster of the band against a sunset backdrop. The poster is reversible; one side shows the band and the other expands into a larger version of the cover art.

It is the band’s first album since 2013’s “Comedown Machine.”

The Strokes formed in Manhattan in 1998, but its sound is more reminiscent of a British rock band of yesteryear. 

Casablancas, bassist Nikolai Fraiture, guitarist Albert Hammond Jr., drummer Fabrizio Moretti and guitarist Nick Valensi met through various New York schools and a Swiss boarding school.

It was a Velvet Underground CD gifted to Fraiture by his brother that inspired The Strokes’ creation.

“They had this reputation in the press of being bad boys. Drinking a lot, getting into trouble. That was their whole persona, cool New York, don’t give-a-fuck type of dudes,” said blogger Laura Young, cited in an article by The Guardian.

Their debut album, 2001 “Is This It” was released after their first demo headlined Reading Festival in the United Kingdom.

It was also released shortly after 9/11, on October 9, 2001.

“New York was grieving and dazed, but the Strokes seemed so emblematic of the city’s excesses and allure that loving them felt nearly patriotic,” wrote Amanda Petrusich of The New Yorker in April.

According to American Songwriter, The Strokes fell victim to rumors and claims that “they were secretly just unskilled pretty boys chosen for their looks … and that they’d stolen all their ideas from seminal punk bands like Television and The Velvet Underground.”

Hammond, Jr. particularly struggled with a drug addiction encouraged by Ryan Adams.

“I remember Julian [Casablancas] threatening to beat Ryan up if he hung out with me, as a protective thing. He’d heard that Ryan would come and give me heroin, so he was just like, ‘If you come to my apartment again with heroin, I’m going to kick your ass,’” Hammond Jr. told Vulture in 2017.

“I think heroin just kind of crosses a line. It can take a person’s soul away. So it’s like if someone is trying to give your friend a lobotomy – you’re gonna step in,” Casablancas said.

Despite a damaged reputation by 2003, the band pressed on and continued making music.

“…They never sold that many records, but they made really good records. The reach, the awareness of them was so much greater than the record sales,” said artist Richard Melville Hall (Moby.) 

“I just think the quality of art, of humanity, has always been relatively similar and there’s always great, inspiring, boundary-pushing things happening at all times. And my dream, goal, hope is that things that are more important and powerful and meaningful become more popular in their own time than later,” Casablancas told Rhian Daly of NME in May.

Paris sets the scene for a superstar’s red rose

Red.

Pop onto artist Caroline Rose’s Instagram page and you will be greeted with image after image of the color red.

It’s no wonder the same red dominates her newest album.

Before she is an artist, Long Island native Rose is a storyteller.

Rose, who twice performed in Lancaster at Tellus360, has declared her main goal in life is to achieve the exact level of happiness that belongs to the Sim version of herself.

Instead of experiencing a planned sold-out tour, she is now an apocalypse survival guide with an immense appreciation for past experiences.

A planned sold-out tour that she’d only just started when the world began to lock down.

“One of the best parts of that [first tour to Europe] was meeting up with a friend in Paris after a show and walking around the city until 4 a.m. In hindsight I really appreciate that night because we saw Notre Dame about a year before it caught fire, now that friend is currently quarantined in her apartment due to the virus mandate in France, and our UK/Europe tour has been postponed until further notice, so I really hold these past moments dear to my heart!” she told Kieran Rogers of Clout in March.

In a bright red album entitled Superstar, Rose intertwines her love of travel with heartbreak, love and independence.

Featuring painted portraits of Rose, tucked away in the cover is a large signed poster of Rose in front of a 7-11, hair salon and insurance company.

The license plates surrounding her read California – a long way from Long Island.

With a steady stream of reverb and changing bassline octaves, Superstar is drenched in a sound similar to the pop of 1980s or 1990s – pop music for weirdos, as defined by Rose.

In the first song, destiny dials from the lobby of Chateau Marmont before avoiding a city of flames to secure fortune.

“Forget about Paris / Let’s get a tan on a beach in Southern France,” she sings in “Pipe Dreams” as a relationship reignites in a brand-new start teetering on marriage.

Paris is also mentioned by name in “Got to Go My Own Way,” an uplifting anthem of independence after a breakup.

“I got to start a new life / I got to go my own way / I was born to be a star / I’m jumping off the deep end / Babe, I’ve got big plans in mind.”

Travel again comes up in a solemn tone during “I Took a Ride” – on an airplane, a train, a Greyhound bus to find her true love again.

“Some men might think that / A woman is weak because she cries / But nothing is stronger than a lover’s lonely tear,” Rose croons.

Each song builds upon the other, as with the architecture Rose initially studied at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

“As an architect, you imagine how you’ll feel moving throughout a space. It’s the same with a song. There are ways of moving through a song like you’d move through a building. I like approaching architecture with a musical mindset,” Rose told Joseph V. Amodio of Newsday in March.

During her interview with Amodio, she was on her way to a Pennsylvanian Jiffy Lube for an oil change.

Aged 13, Rose explored the “collective consciousness of modern mankind” in her first song “Out of Time.”

She took the time during her Austin, Tx. lockdown to learn more about herself, including her fancard for Harry Styles.

“So many people are out of work right now, my problems don’t matter, and we’re facing a much bigger tsunami of issues as a country and a world population that it’s strangely put everything into perspective for me. I’ve been feeling really humble these days,” she told Dan Reed of The Key in April.

Two months later, in June, Rose participated in Black Lives Matter rallies.

“I prefer to be socially distant from most [people] regardless of a virus,” @CarolineRoseFM tweeted on April 3rd during the height of the quarantine.

She has also spent the time reading, everything from “The Body Keeps Score” by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk to the French graphic novel “Blue is the Warmest Color” by Julie Maroh.

Perhaps the truth is that the storyteller is working on the next Great American Novel after her brilliant album.

“Did [you] know that Shakespeare wrote King Lear during quarantine of the plague? All we have to do is write the world’s next great masterpiece,” she tweeted, later disclaiming the tweet as a joke.

Matty Healy inadvertently predicted 2020 in The 1975’s newest album

“Now we all have a choice,” it begins.

“We can create transformational action that will safeguard the living conditions for future generations or we can continue with our business as usual and fail. That is up to you and me.”

One look at these words and it sounds like part of a politician’s speech on the global pandemic or a call to action for the largest civil rights movement in history.

They are, instead, a prophetic set of notes penned by The 1975 for their fourth album, “Notes on a Conditional Form,” created before the events of 2020 transpired. 

“There are no grey areas when it comes to survival,” Greta Thunberg foretells.

“To do your best is no longer good enough / We must all do the seemingly impossible,” she continues, before ending the introduction with: “Everything needs to change, and it has to start today / So, everyone out there, it is now time for civil disobedience / It is time to rebel.”

When The 1975 teamed up with Thunberg, the intent was a call to climate change reform. 

Yet, released in May during the height of the pandemic, it became so much more.

In “People”, the economy is a goner while “it’s Monday morning and we’ve only got a thousand of them left.”

As if that weren’t prophetic in itself, “I don’t like going outside, so bring me everything here” sings the subject of “People,” followed by “Go outside? Seems unlikely” in “Frail State of Mind.”

The album starts with a speech, transitions to a rallying cry and then crescendos into a softer and softer melody with every track.

“Yeah I Know” involves moving to Mars. Other songs speak of love, sex and exploring one’s sexuality. Several support the LGBT community. In “I Think There’s Something You Should Know”, the singer swaps clothes to feel like themselves and reveals there’s something the other party should know.

“Life feels like a lie, I need something to be true / Is there anybody out there?” The 1975 sings in “Nothing Revealed,” summarizing the album in one sentence.

It’s a search for answers – a fight to save humanity from climate change, from hatred and from inequality.

“I think that I’m kind of putting a bow on my adolescence with this record, really. I think that my records have been me as a young man finding my place, and I think that on this record, I kind of found my place,” frontman Matty Healy told Dan Stubbs of NME in May.

Healy, drummer George Daniel, guitarist Adam Hann and bassist Ross McDonald created The 1975 in 2002.

Four mates who met in a Cheshire secondary school outside of Manchester, England – famously known as the home of rock band The Smiths – The 1975 formed as “the best emo band out of Manchester in 2009, and then the worst pop band of 2015. We didn’t give a fuck.”

Healy told Eve Barlow of Vulture in November 2018 that his socialization more frequently occurred online than off, which undoubtedly prepared him for quarantine life in spring 2020.

“I haven’t been social for a year,” Healy said, with unofficial fifth member Jamie Oborne contradicting that Healy “hadn’t been social since I met you.”

“I’m not socially awkward, but I don’t go outside. I watch a lot. I walk around. But I mean emotionally. I don’t go to the pub. I don’t go to a party. I have a private life. When I go outside I only really exist as Matty from the 1975,” added Healy, whose parents are actress Denise Welch of Britain’s “Waterloo Road” and actor Tim Healy of “Coronation Street”.

He also spoke to the climate change that would be included in the 2020 album, saying “I remember a time when the internet was a thing that somebody’s big brother had in their room. Now everything is online, right? What’s the foundation of reality? What does it mean in 30 years? We’re gonna burn up in a ball before then anyway.”

Although some publications have referred to The 1975 either as a rock band or a pop band, Healy insisted The 1975 is not rock.

“It is a rock band in the way that we’re four white blokes playing guitars a lot of the time. But we’re an R&B band before we’re a rock band,” Healy said.

An R&B band whose inspirations include: Joni Mitchell, Michael Jackson, My Bloody Valentine and Talking Heads.

Healy’s music taste also extends to artist Phoebe Bridgers, who features in “Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America”. The two struck up a friendship when Healy confessed in a direct message his fandom of Bridgers. 

“Hating the 1975, I feel like, is sexist. Because teenage girls invented that band being famous. Like, teenage girls invented The Beatles. Teenage girls invented music. You’re trying to say that something’s stupid just because teenage girls like it? It’s fucking insane,” Bridgers told Patrick Clarke of NME in June.

For Healy, it’s all about the story.

“Everybody is living their own movie, everybody is the protagonist in the world. If you’re a writer, you want a great ending, right?” said Healy, who rewrote his own ending when he kicked a heroin addiction.

Khruangbin’s Mordechai is a hello to a struggling world

Burgers, Mexican Coca-Cola and a documentary on Afghani music transformed three strangers from Houston, Tx. into the internationally famous Khruangbin.

Named for the Thai word that closely resembles “airplane” (literally translated: “engine fly,”) Khruangbin first gained recognition in the United Kingdom before acquiring fans such as Jay-Z.

It’s a fitting start for a group influenced by Thai cassettes of the 60s and 70s, as well as other international musicians.

Bassist Laura Lee Ochoa grew up listening to the late Selena, admitting to RIML TV that she tried to imitate Selena’s style, both in ensemble and musically.

“When I was like ten on up, you know, I had long hair with golden streaks in it and thick lipliner and you would find me dancing to Selena. I learned how to sing; I would like practice singing the way she did … it looked awesome and I thought that was how you sang well, but it was just her thing,” Lee said.

Drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson told RIML TV in 2018 that his inspiration stemmed from the musician who shares his name, Don Blackman. 

Guitarist Mark Speer, who initially met Johnson through their church, attended a Parliament concert at age twelve. Although he was later grounded, the performance introduced him to the world of Parliament and he became obsessed.

Khruangbin’s third album, Mordechai – so called due to Speer’s playlist during the making of –  seems to combine their different music tastes: lyrics in Spanish from Selena, a psychedelic sound a la Parliament and a bit of jazz-funk piano like Blackman.

It’s a sound described by the group as “chill-funk…it’s kind of melancholy. It’s dreamy, kind of surfy.”

That chill-funk was inspired by its own international conglomeration, Khruangbin told Maxine Wally of W Magazine: Isley Brothers from Johnson’s playlist, the Pakistani music Lee had on repeat and the soul and funk of Speer’s fascination.

The Russian and Eastern European soul and funk particularly led to the name Mordechai.

In “Connaissais De Face,” the listener is placed in the position of eavesdropping on a private conversation, likely between two exes. “Time changes everything,” one of the individuals remarks, before the instrumental sound takes over with a backdrop of the French language.

“Time (You and I)” sees the fervent wish of having more time to “live forever / Just you and I / We could be together / That’s life”.

The song also shares a beautiful array of language, all saying the same thing: “Life” or “That’s life”. Different phrases are also said in Spanish, French, Italian, Hungarian and various other languages.

“We chose languages in which we know people who speak them. This way it was a lot easier for us to record something in another language. We had our friends guide us,” Speer told Liv Toerkell of NBHAP in June, adding that the song was inspired by Japanese Pop.

Not only did the friends guide Khruangbin, but Speer told Toerkell that the voice recordings of the different languages were the friends themselves in their respective native tongues.

“We want to connect to different audiences and people from around the globe,” Speer added, though the group admitted they have not yet learnt the Thai of their name.

“It is awesome to listen to someone learning a language approaching it from such a different angle and perspective than a native speaker. That just creates another space for meaning and words and emotion to meet,” Speer said. 

Next up is “Pelota”, which is beautifully told through only the Spanish language.

The songs culminate in an album that gorgeously celebrates life throughout different cultures with a calming, mellifluous sound.

Mordechai ends on a poignant note: “Say you remember / For I think I’ve lost it”.

For the few years Lee lived in East London, she continued to practice with Johnson and Speer through Skype.

“It starts with a big bank of classic breaks and drum loops that I’ve collected over the years. I send them to Laura Lee, she picks one, and then she’ll make up something on the bass and send it back to me. I’ll play [the guitar over it] and chop it up in a computer program. Then send that to DJ and he puts his own spin on the drums,” Speer told Dhruva Balram of The Wild City in 2017.

Having originally planned to be an artist, Lee did not anticipate using music as more than inspiration for her art.

“It wasn’t until I had a bad bout of insomnia at 20 that I picked up the bass. I practiced in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep and realized in those moments that music had the power to express everything I wanted to say as an artist,” she told Balram.

Particularly, trying to “erase barriers that have been set up for centuries,” Johnson told Wally.

Indie rock artist Phoebe Bridgers is entranced by the fantastical: nature, astrology and magic.

A self-declared Slytherin, Bridgers also has a fascination with the psychology of cults.

Her second album, Punisher, examines “a leap like that where your life has purpose all of a sudden.”

“No longer a danger to herself or others / She made up her mind and laced up her shoes / Yelled down the hall, but nobody answered,” she sings in “Graceland Too.”

Released June 18th, Punisher’s “Kyoto” sees Bridgers lyricize the rocky relationship she has with her father: “You called me from a payphone / They still got payphones … To tell me you’re getting sober / And you wrote me a letter / But I don’t have to read it.”

Bridgers told Gabriella Paiella of GQ in 2019 that her father worked as a scenic carpenter who “was abusive and had a drug thing.” His addiction led to her control; Bridgers neither drinks, nor partakes in drugs and believes that she is “straight up allergic to alcohol.”

The song particularly resonates with children of alcoholic parents or recovering alcoholics, a theme that is consistent throughout Punisher.

“I want to believe / Instead, I look at the sky and I feel nothing / You know I hate to be alone,” Bridgers hauntingly sings in “Chinese Satellite.”

“I feel like songs are kind of like dreams,” she said via Apple Music.

“Moon Song” is one song that randomly ebbs and flows just like a nonsensical dream.

“We hate Tears in Heaven / But it’s sad that his baby died” she sings in reference to Eric Clapton’s famous song. “And we fought about John Lennon / Until I cried,” she adds, having revealed to Angie Martoccio of Rolling Stone that her love for Lennon is an exception to her hatred of classic rock.

Lennon, after all, inspired Bridgers’ own musical heroes: Daniel Johnston and the late Elliott Smith.

The song continues with an offer of the moon, before adding “You are sick and you’re married / And you might be dying / But you’re holding me like water in your hands.”

Bridgers confessed to Michael Tedder of The Ringer that she debated delaying the release of the album due to the events of 2020.

“In the back of my mind I was like, ‘This is not a short thing. If I delayed it, then when would we put it out?’” Bridgers said.

“We even had to move vinyl pressing plants ‘cause the one we initially were going to use fucking shut down forever,” she added.

Bridgers also made a creative move due to the pandemic, telling Rolling Stone the original title of “ICU” was changed to “I See You” to avoid misunderstandings of insensitivity.

A native of Pasadena, Calif., Bridgers often crossed paths with her parents’ world: the entertainment industry.

“My dad is an alcoholic, I’ve dated a lot of alcoholics, I am friends with a lot of addicts. These are relationships I need to learn how to deal with because they are not going away. I need to grapple with my own control issues. When you’re in those types of relationships, they’re so tempting because you’re watching someone destroy themselves and you feel this savior complex shit for sure but you also feel like an angel every day,” Bridgers confessed to Pitchfork’s Quinn Moreland in June.

She attended Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, played in a punk band and later gained fame in the indie bands Boygenius and Better Oblivion Community Center.

Five years ago at the start of her twenties, she entered a professional relationship with music producer Ryan Adams – the same Ryan Adams who would later be accused of abusive behavior, including from his ex-wife Mandy Moore and Bridgers herself. Twenty years her senior when they met, Bridgers said their professional relationship turned romantic before becoming controlling.

“He’s, as Orson Welles would say, ‘such a pest.’ I feel like the anger I have about it is just for other people. I’m just like, Go the fuck away, dude,’” Bridgers said.

Her history with Adams did help her in one way: it taught her confidence and self-love.

“I think for a while I also looked for relationships where someone would tell me where to stand. I wanted someone to tell me how to be. I certainly am fucking over that.”

Once the recipients of a currency given in matzah ball soup, the three sisters Haim are now international pop legends.

 They’ve toured with Taylor Swift, opened for Mumford and Sons and topped the BBC radio charts since their debut in 2013.

 But before Este, Danielle and Alana Haim (pronounced like “Dime”) were touring the world through the eyes of 1989, they were three girls in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley with platefuls of their mother’s sweet kugel and Barbra Streisand reverberating through the stereo.

 Following several singles, HAIM’s freshman album introduced the world to the three Angelenos of Jewish heritage.

 Their initial introduction, however, came fifteen years earlier, playing Jewish delis and music festivals with their parents as members of “Rockinhaim”.

 “We played a lot of dorky songs. A lot of Santana,” Alana Haim told Mark Savage of BBC News in June 2017.

 Since then, HAIM’s style has become more reminiscent of pop rock mixed with R&B, reverting back to the 1970s and 80s. In their lyrics, they proudly stand for girl power, realize the relationship they lost may have been their fault and emphasize they aren’t anyone’s honey pie.

 Their 2013 freshman album Days Gone By is an anthem to womanhood, told in the sound of that classic West Coast style.

 In “Let Me Go”, the sisters struggle with letting go of a toxic relationship while simultaneously battling the desire to hold on. Contrarily, the star of “Honey & I” and “My Song 5” successfully walks away without hesitation from a tarnished dynamic.

 They plummet “into the fire, feeling higher than the truth / I can feel the heat but I’m not burning” as they never look back and never give up in “Falling”.

 Another relationship comes to an end in “The Wire”, but this time “I know you’re gonna be OK” after she “fumbled when it came to the wire”.

 Don’t save them, they tell listeners in the aptly-titled “Don’t Save Me”.

 “All my life I wasn’t trying to get on a highway / I was wondering which way to go / Spending all of my damn time / Leaving all the weight behind you”.

 In “Days Are Gone”, it’s time to take back control - and they do.

 Through the various relationships and heartbreak, Haim’s overall message is clear: shed the toxicity and stand on your own two feet regardless of what happens.

 This is driven further in “Forever”, with a couple who equally know it is over and are both tired of pretending.

 “There are always three stories when it comes to every song [...] There are two sides to the coin and sometimes it’s your fault,” frontwoman Danielle told BBC Radio 1 in 2017.

 It’s a powerful message to their audience: sometimes the ending of a fairytale is your fault, sometimes it isn’t, but you’re going to be okay either way.

 Growing up with an Israeli father who moved to Ohio in 1980 after being recruited to an American soccer team and a Philly-born folk singer/local disco queen mother, the Haims were destined to join the music scene. Their first concert was at Canter’s - a Jewish deli in Los Angeles. They found inspiration in Streisand, Joni Mitchell and Israeli artist, Ofra Haza.

When the sisters created HAIM, they “spent the first five years of [their] band playing every single venue in LA, trying to get people to listen,” Danielle Haim told Savage.

“But we had, like, zero dollars so every year we would go into a recording studio for a day and try to bang out five songs.”

According to a profile by Fader in 2013, Days Gone By became a favorite of British radio DJ Mary Anne Hobbs.

In mere months after its release, the Haim sisters from LA crossed international charts and earned a Grammy nomination, later opening for Florence and the Machine.

Seven years later, they’ve spoken on the gender pay gap after learning they were paid ten times less than a male artist at a festival and encouraged Swift to ditch the guys and join their crew (she did).

Now, Haim are set to release their third album on June 26th: “Women in Music: Part III”.

It’s a nod to the persistent question of what it’s like to be women in music, the sisters informed Savage in May 2020.

Those “women in music” led dance classes via Zoom through the recent quarantine, with Este deciding she will never “say ‘no’ to anything ever again”.

“If someone is like, ‘I want to go and climb Mount Wilson,’ I’m going to be like, ‘You know what, it might take me a couple of days, but let’s climb Mount Wilson.’”

For three sisters who have climbed their way to the top of the charts, Mount Wilson should be a cakewalk.

Whether Boomer or Millennial, X Gen or The Greatest Generation, Gen Z or The Silent Generation, everyone has struggled with the outward impression they project.

Jane Austen wrote a whole novel on the subject, originally titling it “First Impressions” before changing the story of Lizzie Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy to “Pride & Prejudice”.

Artist Julien Baker’s “Sprained Ankle” is packed in impressions: those she feels she exudes, those she wishes to emit and those that others may falsely believe.

Baker was twenty years old when “Sprained Ankle” was released, but she sings with a sophistication and a voice more indicative of an artist in later stages of their adulthood than one just starting out.

The album is a glimpse into a page of Baker’s prayer journal or an overheard private conversation between herself and her Father.

In “Good News”, she boldly admits that “it’s not easy when what you think of me is important / And I know it shouldn’t be so damn important / But it is to me”.

Her fellow Millennials can especially relate to this statement in a world of selfie culture and social media updates, but ultimately, so can anyone. 

A particularly striking canticle is “Everybody Does”, in which she tells the eavesdropper that it’s okay for them to run because everybody does.

“I’m interested in a carpenter, so elegant at placing splinters / Right beneath my nails / Where I cannot dig them out / The same briars from your wrists / Are the tinder in my father’s house” she sings in lyrics heavily thematic of her confirmed religious beliefs.

She also uses the song as assurance that she knows “herself better than anyone else.”

Titular ditty “Sprained Ankle” speaks to the anxiety others face when in conversation, emphasizing that it is much easier to discuss small talk like the weather or niceties than to question an individual’s true mental state.

The final notes of “Go Home” lead into a radio speech of Scripture that is overlaid with an instrumental piece of “In Christ Alone”.

“Go Home” is also the last ballad on the album.

Baker holds a degree in literature from Middle Tennessee State University and references Gabriel García Márquez in interviews.

Interestingly, García Márquez was 23 he wrote his first novel, only three years older than Baker when her first album came out in 2015. 

A Tennessee native, her draw to music came from Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance and other alternative bands she saw with her father at the skate park.

Baker grew up in a Christian home and considers herself a strong Christian who self-identifies as queer. It is important to her that people know both aspects of her identity.

The album is coated in Christian themes, as well as struggle with addiction and recovery.

She crafted and released “Sprained Ankle” whilst attending university, where she double minored in Spanish and secondary education along with her degree in literature.

“Sprained Ankle” is, itself, a metaphor, as Baker explained to Rachel Syme of The New Yorker. 

“‘You have to keep walking on something to make it better. Sometimes you want to complain and be like, ‘Why? Life is so horrible.’ But it doesn’t change that there are redeeming qualities and a universal capacity for redemption and grace. There are still things that make it worth it and bearable,’” she told Syme.

Now preparing her third album, Baker told Anna Nicolaou of Financial Times that “Sprained Ankle” began as “‘bedroom songwriter stuff that wasn’t going to work.’”

She possesses a compassion and heart that is passionate toward the sufferings of humanity around her.

“‘I have the news from all over the world, like a fire hose spraying in my face … so that giant ocean, the gulf of concerns, huge and small, keeps widening, and then we don’t know what to do other than to just say that we’re sad! And tweet that we’re sad.’”

Although Baker writes her lyrics for herself, she also does so to help others.

 “‘I have had so many kids come up to me and say a song I wrote saved them. So now, when I sing, I know that, even if problems the songs entail are solved for me, just admitting that they happened will help solve those problems for another person. Or at least ease the struggle knowing that our pain is shared, that someone else has felt angry, spiteful, or hurt,’” she told Syme.

Long before Taylor Swift and her fight for her masters, there was Joni Mitchell engaged in the same battle.

Denied her own masters, Mitchell pushed back against society’s ideas of what was appropriate for a female musician.

She may have made waves by rejecting feminism, but from the beginning of her career, Mitchell has been unafraid to call out sexism in the music industry.

“It’s a man’s world. Men wrote most of the songs for women and they were mostly tales of seduction. I wrote my own songs. That ended that,” she told Elio Iannacci of Macleans in 2014.

Mitchell especially holds court in her 1974 “Court and Spark”, an album sheathed in lyrics that were undoubtedly once belted out with the windows rolled down on a fast highway in a summer sun.

The dreamers in Mitchell’s album face internal battles and imagine seizing adventure, from “Free Man in Paris” to the partygoers with “passport smiles” in “People’s Parties” – the individuals masking their private struggles who cope by “laughing it all away”.

LA, the city of the fallen angels. A man daydreaming about days long gone in Paris, a cabaret and a stroll down the Champs-d’Élysées. 

Listening to Mitchell is like sitting in a Broadway theatre, balancing on the edge of the seat as the characters become familiar.

“Twisted” particularly showcases Mitchell’s range, with its wild child who insisted at the age of three that they were a wizard.

“They all laugh at angry young men / They all laugh at Edison / And also at Einstein / So why should I feel sorry” Mitchell sings.

Growing up in the conformist society of the 1950s, it could be that Mitchell is speaking of herself and misunderstood ambitions that were discouraged of a lady at the time.

The stories told throughout “Court and Spark” surpass lyricism and venture into the troubadours of olde, befitting its title. 

Joshua Pickard of Chattanooga Today wrote in 2015: “These songs are soft-spoken and gentle when compared to many of the more fiery orators that were releasing music around her, but it was Mitchell’s ability to be persuasive without resorting to theatrics or argumentative rhetoric that allowed her songs to have the impact they did.”

In the first line of “Raised on Robbery”, Mitchell sings “he was sitting in the lounge of the Empire Hotel / he was drinking for diversion / he was thinking for himself” as if she held a microphone on the stage of a 1940s/1950s USO dance. 

Mitchell told New York Magazine in 2005 that she was inspired by Charlie Parker; classical greats like Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, Frédéric Chopin, Pyotr Tchaikovsky and artists specifically named Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Rembrandt van Rijn and Pablo Picasso.

Mitchell found a way to turn their works into music, especially in “Court and Spark”. Rembrandt, like Mitchell, captured the world around him. Matisse and Gauguin found the color in the world and used it to its full effect. Stravinsky penned an entire ballet of spring. In what may be his most famous piece, Debussy captured the music of the moon.

Similarly, “Court and Spark” is hued in everything from the royal purples of its titular song, to the sky blues of “Help Me”, the golden tones of “Free Man in Paris” and the neon oranges of “Twisted”. It drifts from season to season, digging into earthen concerns with a sophistication that would make some of the world’s best artists and novelists envious. 

Mitchell herself is an artist and poet, though she would say her musical style is based more in film art.

“My style of songwriting is influenced by cinema. I’m a frustrated filmmaker. A fan once said to me, ‘Girl, you make me see pictures in my head!’ and I took that as a great compliment. That’s exactly my intention,” she told Ethen Brown of New York Magazine.

A native Canadian, Mitchell moved to New York in the late sixties.

Despite a large fanbase, she was largely overlooked by the music industry and even her own label.

“There was no public recognition for my work and none at my record company. It was the same frustration that Van Gogh and Gauguin felt when I read back on them,” she said.

Whenever, wherever, whatever.

Whenever – the 90s, a year before the loss of Princess Di. Wherever – New York. Whatever – Maxwell and his unfailing ability to romanticize life.

Re-released almost twenty years after its debut, Maxwell’s “Urban Hang Suite” is a sensual experience from the first note.

The Grammy-award winning Maxwell’s lyrics are as velvet and delicious as the chocolate and cocoa mentioned in his “Sumthin’ Sumthin”.

In “Ascension (Don’t Ever Wonder)”, he tells the listener “shouldn’t I realize / You’re the highest of the high / If you don’t know, then I’ll say it / So don’t even wonder”.

The next song, “Dancewitme”, begins with what may be a sigh and then transitions into a soft, poetic waterfall of words asking the woman to “let me groove with you / ‘cause I can’t take it any longer”.

It’s the story of falling in love, encapsulated in “Whenever Wherever Whatever”, which reveals that the song’s character is willing to “give you the breath that I breathe / And if ever you yearn for the love in me … wish I knew if I could / Be the one that you would.”

There’s something almost magical about each song, composed of lyrics with a sound that is purely 90s R&B.

But, as with the greatest love stories of literature, the perfect quietude of ballad ends with the final note of the love story.

The jazzy R&B styles of the instruments backing Maxwell are just as adept at invoking a response in the listener.

Born Gerald Maxwell Rivera on a 1973 May day in Brooklyn, the artist known as Maxwell has been credited as “among a number of artists who were influential in helping to create the ‘neo soul’ musical sound in the late 1990s”, according to Mark Edward Nero of liveaboutdotcom.

Maxwell began playing in New York at age 18. He became “Maxwell” to keep his family life private and signed on with Columbia Records in his early twenties after waiting tables, “inspired by Patrice Rushen, The S.O.S. Band, and Rose Boyce”.

The liner notes of the album include a note from music journalist Mitchell Cohen, saying that “It came out as brilliantly as he’d hoped, an album that spoke to a new romanticism that had been missing in so much synthetic, inorganic R&B. Some people started calling it neo-soul, and that was fine. What it was was ubiquitous.”

When initially released in 1996, “Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite” debuted at No. 38 on the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, remaining there for 78 weeks.

It was noted by Rolling Stone, USA Today, and Time as one of the year’s best albums and earned a Grammy nomination.

Maxwell was quoted by Gulf News as saying, “‘You can always write a song about people who are in love, but they’re in love so they’re happy, they don’t need you. But the people that I try to worry about are the ones who don’t have anyone to give chocolate to, and the girl who doesn’t have flowers coming to her.’”

His first album reflects this idea, with its tale of love and the heartbreak that can disrupt even the sweetest love affair.

And though he is known as one of the soul artists of the 90s, Maxwell told Gulf News that he doesn’t mind the new sound.

“‘Soul music is soul music. It can be wrapped up in a neo soul package; it can be called hip-hop soul. But soul is soul, and it’s been around; it will never go away.’”

Think of a musician who exuded effortless cool and jazz icon Miles Davis will undoubtedly be one of the first to come to mind.

Like early photographs of Miles in immaculate suits and casual wear foreshadow, Davis moved seamlessly with the times. His black-and-white photos of a trumpet player in a crisp white shirt and short hair evolved into photos of vibrant polka dot jackets and Davis’ ever-present sunglasses.

Backed by John Coltrane (on just a few tracks, as he had left Miles earlier that year), Hank Mobley, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb and Philly Joe Jones, “Someday My Prince Will Come” is as sweet as its title, a solid cool jazz album.

The stylistic diversity this genre has to offer is all exemplified here, even though it was made in a time where free jazz was more popular. Notice the softer drumming, intermingling melodic lines, and subdued yet pastel tones.

Released in 1961, the cover features Davis’ then-wife, Frances Taylor and introduces a jazzed-up, purely instrumental version of Disney’s Snow-White ballad, which also ends the album. And many of the songs are named after actual friends. 

The suave tones of Davis kick off SMPWC with the aplomb that ran his career over the span of six decades, from 1945 until his death in 1991.

“Pfrancing” is a fun-filled piece from the first note and immediate snap of the fingers in time to Davis’ smooth beat. The title merges the words dancing, frantic, and prancing, as well as pays tribute to the wife. 

It’s a smooth beat that carries throughout the rest of the album, which was recorded at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in Manhattan over the course of three days, and where Coltrane showed up and contributed. 

As noted on his website, Miles had attempted to recapture the miracle of Blue In Green on Drad-Dog (Goddard, the name on Columbia’s then-revered president), but quickly returned to hard bop for much of the rest of this album. 

SMPWC is often overlooked when praising Davis’ work. Several music journalists point to the 1959 “Kind of Blue” as his quintessential album, and Robert Palmer of Rolling Stone names the 1960 “Sketches of Spain” and 1970 “Bitches Brew” as favorites.

But there’s a magic to be said for SMPWC, as there was a magic to be said about Davis himself. Coltrane was so happy to see Coltrane, even if it was for the last time. And they made an effort to extend the modal explorations of Flamenco Sketches on Teo.

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, famous jazz musician Davis was “one of the major influences on the art from the late 1940s”.

Steve Seel of The Current noted Davis transformed jazz, “leading the way in the invention of new forms like bebop, cool jazz, jazz fusion, and much more.”

I think Miles' work helped give deeper meaning to jazz. Jazz pre-1940s seems much livelier and less subdued than jazz post-1940s, perhaps due to the change of mindset at the time. Miles particularly pours a cauldron of emotion into his work, blending blues and r&b with jazz, which turned jazz on its head. 

Hailing from the East St. Louis, Il. area, Davis attended the Institute of Musical Art in New York (the school that would later become Juilliard).

Artist John Legend told The Fader in 2005 that “to our generation, Miles just represents cool. You look at the pictures and all the photography made him look like an icon who had his own unique thing and was so cool and comfortable in that thing.”

It’s a cool that many long to emulate, as evident in the 2019 sale of Davis’ trumpet.

Auctioned at Christie’s in London, the trumpet sold for $275,000, exceeding original estimates of $70,000 to $100,000.

According to Antiques and The Arts Weekly, the purchase was “a record for a trumpet at auction”.

It couldn’t be anything but, as the personal instrument of the man credited with changing the face of jazz about oh, five or six times, as he told a stunned woman sitting across from him at the White House of the Reagan administration during a tribute to Ray Charles. She had the gall to ask what Davis had accomplished that was “so important”.

It’s time to follow your sweet soul, travel down the dusty country road and sing “A country tune / And carry the name / Sweet Valerie June.”

In Valerie June’s “The Order of Time,” released in 2017, the listener is instantly brought into a church pew to taste one of Gran’s “best yeast rolls” and hear the “Gospel of stories told / Bout the one way to save your soul” before learning of the grandfather who worked himself “to the ground” to ensure his family had every provision and the granddaughter who left for “a brighter day” the moment she turned 18.

It’s a song that particularly resonates with audience members’ memories of hardworking grandparents or their own efforts to leave home and make something of themselves.

June’s sound borrows greatly from country radio of old, with her heavy Western Tennessee accent crooning away. Her warble holds traces of a more bluesy Dolly Parton mixed with Loretta Lynn and Brenda Lee, particularly in their early days. 

If Parton, Lynn and Lee formed a band with Janis Martin and other rockabilly singers, it might come close to explaining June’s style – something she has difficulty doing herself.

June told Lauren Tingle of CMT News in 2017 that she often gets asked about her compilation of different styles.

“’I grew up in Jackson, and so I got country from Nashville and soul, rockabilly, rock ‘n’ roll from Memphis. I just feel like that shaped me. It also shaped me to be raised down the street from where Tina Turner was born,’” June said.

Tingle herself tried to pinpoint June’s style, calling it a “unique blend of country, blues, rockabilly and soul that can simply be describe as Valery June music.”

On a couple songs, the background instruments become more of a footnote in the song as June’s voice shines, unaccompanied.

One such ballad is “With You”, a stunning song that sweetly begins with “Can I have this dance?”

Seemingly accompanied only by a guitar, it’s a sonata that speaks of the “do-si-do” and “toe to toe” of falling in love “so deep and true”, a perfect “periwinkle rose.”

June questions if she should take a chance with the unnamed individual, to “plant a money tree / Grow a love so free.”

However, she adds later, “you can’t hold on / To what’s come or gone / Only what’s begun.”

If these lyrics are any indication, June’s music is pure poetry.

In “Man Done Wrong,” June deals with “shadows dancin’ at her door”, difficult friends and neighbors and the decision that she won’t fight them anymore.

The most gorgeous song on the album is arguably “Astral Plane,” focusing more on June’s voice with minimal instrumental backup and questioning an internal light that dances on an astral plane.

“A looking glass can only hide so much.”

June told Vice reporter Annalise Domenighini in 2017 that she grew up inspired by artists like Joan Baez, Mike Dillon and Joni Mitchell.

“She was drawn to songs she thought moved people and inspired change, music with a moral message,” Domenighini reports.

June “freaking loved hearing the story about Joni Mitchell going to cafes and playing or people playing for freedom … [the blues is] not meant to keep a person in a dark place, and the same with folk. The power that music [has] to move people and to change parts in time is what drew me to it.”

She doesn’t want to be defined by just one style and states that she lets the music lead her.

“Maybe you’re at one of my shows and you’re sitting, or standing, or dancing beside someone who’s older and a different color. Bringing all of that all together in one room or one place, and turning off the minds that would be normally going, allows a huge shift to be able to happen in a consciousness.”

With a euphonious tale and a black-and-white cover to boot, one would think J.S. Ondara stepped out of the 1960s.

The Kenyan-born Ondara may be 27, but his lyrics far transcend his generation and, indeed, the twenty-first century.

His lilting melody effuses images of Chicago nightclubs during its blues explosion or an open door somewhere in Greenwich Village. Ondara sings of the contradiction of the American dream with a knowledge so pronounced that he may as well have attended a Vietnam protest first-hand.

Released by Verve Records in 2019, his debut album “Tales of America” examines the present climate of the United States through the eyes of one who left for Minnesota to follow a dream.

Each song is beautifully written and saturated in evocative imagery, with two back-to-back melodies particularly standing out: “Torch Song” and “Saying Good in Goodbye”.

In one, Ondara says his heart is “never on time, always a little behind.” In the other, he sings “there goes my innocence.”

Yet, it’s “Somebody call the doctor, from the university / Somebody call upon the witch and the wizardry / Somebody call the rabbi, the pastor and the sheik ‘cause we are coming on the days of insanity” from aptly-titled “Days of Insanity” that displays Ondara’s full writing talents and the unifying theme of the album.

Likewise, “They call her Delilah / the Queen of Deceit / they call her the girl from the magazine” soon follows in the next song, “Television Girl”. In Christian history, Delilah is infamously known for betraying Samson by cutting off his strength-giving hair.

“In the water, in the fire, I’ll go wherever you go / in the valley, in the canyons, I’ll go wherever you go” he sings in “Lebanon”.

In ending ballad “God Bless America”, he speaks for those who are unable to speak for themselves: “Will you let me in, or are you at capacity / will you set me free, are you holding onto history / Will you be sincere, are you averse to honesty / Will you dare to hear those children marching on the street”.

The record is a compilation of poem after poem, culminating in a sound that is entirely his. It’s accompanied by a wonderful array of traditional folk instruments to back him.

And their main man grew up in a family unable to afford musical instruments of their own.

The album is also a tantalizing narration redolent of Bob Dylan.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that Ondara counts Dylan as one of his greatest inspirations. He confessed to Rolling Stone in February 2019 that he first learnt of Dylan following a losing bet with a friend.

According to the interview conducted by Erik Tanner, it was Ondara’s insistence in favorite band Guns N’ Roses fathering “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” that led him to discover the real artist behind the song: Bob Dylan.

He became infatuated, both with Dylan and American folk music. After achieving his green card, Ondara moved to Hibbing, Minn., simply because it was Dylan’s hometown.

“‘I had been thinking I’ll move to this place and I’ll form a band, and then I’ll take it on the road. But then I get to Minnesota, and it hits me very quickly that I don’t know anyone. Getting to America was impossible, but the path ahead of me, once I got there, felt even more impossible,’” he told Tanner.

Ondara’s passion began as “the weird guy listening to a bunch of rock songs” in a Nairobi Internet café, though his notebooks were full of lyrics and poems long before he stepped into the locale. His budding career, however, started during open mic nights in Minneapolis.

Ondara and Dylan share similar themes and style, particularly to Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” (as opposed to Ondara’s “gone with the wind,”) the lull of “Girl from the North Country” compared to Ondara’s “Television Girl” and, perhaps coincidentally, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” (The album seems a response to this ballad especially.) But Ondara’s voice is, of course, very different from Dylan’s heavy American accent.

He was discovered on YouTube by DJ Andrea Swensson, was courted by various labels and then began working on an album in a Los Angeles studio.

The result lays behind a record sleeve depicting a Romanesque painting.

Ondara concluded an autumn tour in the United Kingdom, France and Australia, mere months before the January 2020 announcement of a second (sophomore) album in the works!

Bob Dylan penned a heartsick poem. David Bowie fell unabashedly in love. During the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, a 19-year-old chanteuse later labeled by Mick Jagger as his “ideal woman” began a career in the emerging Yé-Yé (pop) music genre.

More than fifty years later and following a miraculous recovery from a coma, the singer and songwriter Françoise Hardy has proven herself as France’s own musical Energizer Bunny. 

Hardy became a household name with her 1962 debut album, Tous les garçons et les filles (“All the boys and girls,”) released four months before a different debut album: “Please Please Me” by Britain’s original boyband, The Beatles.

Nearly a diamond jubilee after Hardy’s rise to fame and 24 other albums for her adoring fans, Audio Clarity last year re-released one of her greatest albums – “Mon Amie La Rose,” a title-less two-sided record nicknamed after her most successful song on the album.

Hardy’s work can be found on both Spotify and YouTube, but neither streaming service carries the same magical sound reverberating from a turntable.

It’s as if Hardy herself is standing near the closet, performing a private concert for two. 

Or perhaps you’ve teleported to a sidewalk café in de Gaulle-led France and caught a live show.

Boasting the same cover that greeted American fans in 1964, Hardy’s twelve-song album, with an accompaniment by the Charles Blackwell Orchestra and a duet that features Mickey Baker, is a delight from the first note. 

Her melodies are upbeat, reminiscent of a world that welcomed, according to the British Reader’s Digest, “a new wave of folk and pure R&B revivals.”

In a colorful array of breathtaking lyrics, two songs particularly stand out: “Je veux qu’il revienne” (literally translated, “I want it to return”; its English title is “Only You Can Do It”) and “Mon amie la rose” (My friend, the rose.)

The former is bright and bouncy, while the latter brings a deeper, bluesy tone to an album lathered in playful, exuberant melodies.

À l'aurore je suis née / Baptisée de rosée / Je me suis épanouie, Hardy sings in “Mon amie la rose.” (At dawn I was born, baptized with the dew / I blossomed.)

It’s only a hint of the symbolism that exudes from her lyrics, full of love and loss with a relatability that transcends the generations.

One needn’t understand the French language to comprehend Hardy’s longevity, though comprehension does help to decipher the lyrics. 

Still, as even a fluent French student may find difficulty in exact translation, it’s strongly recommended to listen to the tracks at least once through before listening again whilst looking at the French lyrics and their English translations.

The 1960s saw France in a stable economy, but with a bubbling desire of rebellion that mirrored the adolescence of Americans and Brits. Teens of the time had grown up in a post-war Paris, such as Hardy, who told NPR that she’d grown up influenced by British pop streaming in from Radio Luxembourg.

France-Amérique’s Roland Flamini dubbed her “France’s greatest treasure” in August 2018; yet, she confessed to The Guardian in April of the same year that she felt her early melodies were lacking “sophistication.” 

This sentiment has clearly been dismantled by the millions that listened to her first single.

Several publications noted her as the “French cover girl of the 1960s,” with Vogue lovingly crafting a spread detailing the steps to achieve a style akin to hers shortly before Hardy’s 71st birthday in 2015. She’s still to this day known as the epitome of chic French fashion.

And Hardy’s tunes are so wonderfully catchy that they’ll station themselves in the mind for days (especially after listening to the record on repeat) but you won’t care.

Go ahead: grab a French dictionary, browse a French language forum, open Duolingo or simply take a chance on music you can’t understand. Turn on some Françoise Hardy.