Miley Cyrus And The Beatles Made Our Weekend In Music
By Patrick Hosken
We write about a lot of music during the week. We also write a lot about what musicians do that’s not directly related to their music. Because we live in a headphones-in kind of culture, we’re always listening to music — yes, even when it’s not part of work.
This is a look at the music we dug into over this past weekend, an interesting one with the holiday season backdropping it all.
[P.S. We’re doing this every week, so get pumped.]
A new Miley Cyrus song just in time for Christmas could've been a disaster, and I don't mean that in a negative way. We got a lot (like, a lot) of new Miley jams this year, so to end 2015 with yet another late-night, weed-fueled song sketch would've amounted to just a bit too much of a good thing. Luckily for us, she had something entirely different to say this time. No musings on dead animals or mini pot-smoke anthems, just old-fashioned yuletide melancholy with a little help from The Flaming Lips -- and I can always get behind that.
"My Sad Christmas Song," with its plaintive strums and real-talk lyrics, amounts to a poignant song that skips fake Christmas cheer in favor of real emotions, however weird and off-putting they are. "I wrote it in the car on my ride home/ 'Cause I knew I'd walk in the door and I'd be alone," she sings near the beginning, and damn, yeah. Christmas sadness is real and strange, and Miley nails it here, going in detail about leaving out some beers for Santa instead of cookies because he probably needs one.
With LCD Soundsystem penning another downer Christmastime tune this season, it's been a good holiday to be a grinch -- or to just be kinda glum about the whole thing. Thanks for the realness, Miley.
When The Beatles' discography became available for streaming on Christmas Eve, I was really only half excited. It's weird -- I just felt like I'd had my fill for a while and that maybe I'd go back and listen to an early record like Please Please Me in a few months when the mood came calling. But then, for old time's sake, I hit play on my favorite, The Beatles (the 1968 double LP everyone calls "The White Album"), and took in all 93 minutes of it.
This is the weird record where a song about pigs out to dinner "with their piggy wives" comes right after the immortal "Blackbird," where "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" and "Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey." But it's also the album where Ringo Starr appears out of nowhere like a wild Pokémon and lays down the basement jam-sesh singalong track of the century, "Don't Pass Me By," which is really a love song but sounds like a goofy drunken marching band falling apart. It's legitimately awesome, and for the first time in a long time, I got actually excited -- not just pleasantly content -- to hear a Beatles song again. Who knew the sloppy one from Ringo would do the trick?
Let us know what you listened to this weekend, and we'll check it out!
