Music/Art

🎧 Songs of the Week #12: The world put you in front of me and we aligned.

📅 December 3-9, 2022: Featuring Grimes, EVAN GIIA, Tourist feat. Ardyn, Remi Wolf, and Noosa (Sound Remedy Remix)

Welcome to week #12 of the Steel Orca Songs of the Week.

Ok, we’re going deep this week because I was on an airplane without Wi-Fi. I know! How shocking. No connectivity at 30,000 feet. It’s supposed to be almost 2023. How come this isn’t solved by now?

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So I got asked by someone very important to me why I do this - and I was thinking about it today and came up with the following:

When I started my career in a fluorescent-lit windowless office, I would be bored in the morning and want something to read that was available in email or text form so that I could read it for at least five minutes to kill some time. Ideally, it would be in an email/plain text form so it halfway looked like work so that if my boss came and peeked over my shoulder, I wouldn’t get in trouble. For these purposes, I used to go on multiple websites early in the morning before I logged in, copy and paste all the contents as plain text to notepad, then send it to my work email. Just a little tip to all you office workers out there 👨‍💻.

Now, this newsletter isn’t that - if I had read this same thing at my desk years ago, my boss would surely have busted me 😡. But it’s the spiritual successor to it - like me writing to my past self - “Stay positive. I know it’s boring. Check this out.”

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Playlist Breakdown

Here are the songs for the week of December 9, 2022 ✈️.

Someone smarter than me said brevity is the soul of wit, so I will try to take that advice to heart this week.

Like I said above, I picked all of these songs while on a tiny airplane with (gasp!) no Wi-Fi and no power outlets available. I felt like the guy from that Twilight Zone episode.

So to alleviate my anxiety, I dove into my old favourites. I had all of these songs downloaded to my device already (I had no idea about the lack of internet in advance), so that gives you an idea of how much I appreciate these songs. Enjoy!

Grimes - Flesh without Blood

Release Date: October 26, 2015
Label: 4AD
Genre: Electropop
Spotify Plays: 60,265,495
Origin: Montreal, Quebec 🇨🇦

Everybody is giving Elon Musk’s ex-girlfriend/baby mama such a hard time these days because she named her kids “crazy” names and is into crypto and NFTs. She always struck me as a radical, even years ago. I thought that was why we liked her to begin with. Did we not know this in 2015 when we all thought she was unique and inventive? Is the problem more to do with the fact that she’s rich now? Or is this Elon hate by proxy?

No matter what you think of her now, there’s a reason she blew up initially, and this song is one of the prime examples. Her music is generally fantastic and inventive, and her sound is reminiscent of the classic pop songstresses of my youth but with an electronic edge that makes it hip. I say stop hating. Grimes (née Claire Elise Boucher) is like the cool, weird French Canadian girl sitting in the corner with her rainbow hair who won’t talk to you but reads a lot of anime. No wonder that nerd ended up with her.

EVAN GIIA - Encore

Release Date: September 20, 2019
Label: Astralwerks
Genre: Electropop
Spotify Plays: 1,343,733
Origin: Hingham, Massachusetts 🇺🇸

This is the darkest-sounding song on the list, and that’s probably why I like it.

Evan Giia (née Evan Giarrusso) is a classically-trained opera singer who’s had several recent successes as a vocalist on the electronic music scene since 2017. Now based out of Brooklyn, her second single, “Brave,” was listed as the top single by Hype Machine the year it was released. More recently, in September of this year, her collaboration with Dylan Francis and Illenium -“Don’t Let Me Go”- hit number one on the US dance radio chart. So I am guessing that 2023 will also be a big year for her.

Your next bet to catch her is December 29th at Big Night Live in Boston. If I lived in Boston, I would be going.

Tourist - We Stayed Up All Night (featuring Ardyn)

Release Date: June 30, 2017
Label: Monday Records
Genre: Electronica
Spotify Plays: 41,052,656
Origin: Cornwall/Gloucestershire, England 🇬🇧

Ok, so I’ve got a couple of quick anecdotes to go with this song:

This came out at the end of June 2017, and I went to Shambhala Music Festival in August 2017. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m not one for staying up too late (I fall asleep too quickly and easily), but the Saturday night of Shambhala, a friend and I pulled an all-nighter until the sun came up. I know, for you music festival types, that’s not a huge accomplishment, but I haven’t stayed up all night since then, so this song always reminds me of that. It’s one of those memories that has been seared into my brain forever 🌄.
This also came out a few months before my first kid was born, so anyone who’s a parent knows how that goes. This became my theme song for those first couple of months. If anyone reading this is going through that now, good luck. Oh yeah, and don’t skip sleep training. It will save your sanity.

Ardyn is not currently on the road, but you can catch Tourist on a mini US tour in early February. Buy tickets at Songkick here.

Remi Wolf - Disco Man

Release Date: May 27, 2020
Label: Island Records
Genre: Dance/Electronic
Spotify Plays: 38,248,290
Origin: Palo Alto, California 🇺🇸

I say this every week about the second to last song on the list, but this was almost the song of the week. I love this tune, and I adore Remi Wolf. She’s also a former competitive alpine skier 🎿.

This girl is unapologetically herself - extroverted, colourful, and loud, but in a fun, not obnoxious, way. She’s an excellent singer, a great live performer, and a great writer (the lyrics in this song are also clever). This song should have been on one of the lists long ago. According to the latest comments on the official video, she might have just landed a Google ad (cha-ching 💰). I haven’t seen it yet, though.

Expect to hear much more from Remi Wolf in the future. In the short term, it looks like she’s currently touring Australia.

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Song of the Week 🙌🎵

Noosa - Walk on by (Sound Remedy Remix)

Release Date: September 3, 2012
Label: Noosa
Genre: Dance/Electronic
Spotify Plays: 5,404,078
Origin: Los Angeles, California 🇺🇸

When initially thinking about writing this post and looking at the tracks included in it, I thought this was the first playlist I’ve done thus far with a theme. Still, now I realize that what I thought the theme was was incorrect. The underlying theme seems to be old songs that were popular hits on Hype Machine (RIP) a few years ago 👴.

Based out of Los Angeles, California, this upbeat Sound Remedy remix of an otherwise sad-sounding original ballad by Noosa was one of my favourite songs when I heard it for the first time around 2016. Yes, I was pretty late to the party on this one, but this song is excellent, and if this is the first time you’re being exposed to Sound Remedy, I recommend you explore his discography. Unfortunately, both Noosa and Sound Remedy have gone a bit quiet over the last several years. Sound Remedy, at least, has tweeted recently that he is primed to start releasing his music more consistently in 2023, beginning in January. Here’s hoping that Noosa, whose last track, “Monotype,” came out in October 2021, feels similarly inspired.