May the Color of Spring Bring You Happiness

Spring has officially started, and as usual here in New York, we are greeted with frosty temperatures and the need for winter jackets. But the birds are singing, the trees are blooming, and the anticipation of the warm season is growing, even if we still have to wait a few weeks to say the final goodbye to winter.

Last year, we attempted a spring playlist, only to find out that there are few songs that we strongly associate with the season. This year, we make it easier and bring an album to your attention: The 1986 record The Color of Spring by the UK band Talk Talk.

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I got into Talk Talk with their second single, also called “Talk Talk,” which made German radio hosts chuckle. A few years later, I bought their first two albums, The Party is Over (1982) and It’s My Life(1984). Both are 80s synth-pop gems, and I had them in constant rotation on my turntable.

Their third and most successful record, The Colour of Spring was different and incorporated a jazzy vibe with acoustic drums, bass guitar and organs. That was a bummer at first for an electronic music lover like me. But not for long: The first song, “Happiness is Easy,” is brilliant and probably helped to open up my musical taste more than anything else. The change of sound was natural for the band, whose singer Mark Hollis disliked synthesizers and supposedly used them for the first two albums because they were cheaper than live musicians. (I suspect there were other reasons, too, as Talk Talk’s earlier work fits perfectly into the canon of early 80s UK pop bands.)

The album was released on February 17 and includes a song about spring, “April 5.” Otherwise it features a good dose of autumnal melancholy – Mark Hollis’ vocals alone guarantee this. However, the ebbing and swelling of the music with the bright organ sound make it a timeless soundtrack for the season as a whole.

Among last Friday’s many releases were two albums made by bilingual singers, whose silvery bright voices make them an excellent companion for spring. Lorely Rodriguez, aka Empress Of, released her fourth full-length, For Your Consideration. The record contains both English and Spanish and dips into diverse production styles.

We have been fans of Lorely since CMJ 2015 when we saw two of her shows. In the following years, we tried to catch her live whenever we could until she moved to LA, where she took her musical career to the next level.

Celebrate, the name of the second album by Parisian musician Halo Maud makes alone a good spring album. But the music does more to evoke the awakening of nature: the chiming, shimmering sounds and Halo Maud’s cheerful vocals lift you up like a warm breeze in May.

Song Pick of the Day

Listen to/watch all seven songs on YouTube. Follow our daily updated playlists on YouTube and Spotify for the 50 latest Song Picks of the Day. Thank you for following us and sharing the excitement.

Growing Pains, the new EP by Will Knox, is a quiet affair: inspired by therapy, the Amsterdam-via-London singer/songwriter connects his own childhood with the one of his newborn son. Aside from the title cut, there is also a beautiful Christmas song on it, which features our new favorite European city, Lisbon, and néomí on backing vocals.

Mary Middlefield has lived all her life in Lausanne, Switzerland, so her songwriting developed far away from the world’s hotspot music scenes. That does not keep her from presenting an absolute indie rock banger with her new single, “Young and Dumb.” The song will be on her new EP, out on April 28.

[Jason Gould] (https://glamglare.com/artist/jason-gould) is the son of Barbra Streisand. You can speculate whether that helped or hurt his journey of making music. In the end, he says he couldn’t live his life any differently: “[Creativity is] the most important element of my own wellness and peace of mind.” His song “Sacred Days” is a beautiful, smart pop piece in the veins of Roland Orzabal (Tears For Fears.)

“Slow” starts in the bedroom and ends in a kathartic celebration of life. “This song represents the moment where the fog lifted, and I saw what I needed to grow, but wasn’t fully sure how to get there,” LA singer/songwriter Holly Blair says, and you can feel this in her music. She is also a filmmaker, so enjoy the video, despite being only a quick shot “home video:”

At the beginning of “Breach,” you would not think that you’re in for such a wild ride, including a crazy guitar solo. That fits the situation the Brooklyn artist Nisa wants to cover here. “‘Breach' is a rehearsal of a break-up with an inconstant version of myself,” she explains.

The lower-case lovers mui zyu and lei, e collaborated for “sparky” - and drove my spell checker crazy. The song is about happiness, but it wouldn’t be mui zyu if there were not a quirk to it: “the song is named after the dog ‘Sparky’ from the opening of David Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’ who is the perfect image of joyfulness – biting water from a hose in front of their dead owner,” she explains. Still, the overall mood fits the spring theme of this newsletter.

If you search for Annie-Dog you probably will find a song by The Smashing Pumpkins from their ’98 album Adore. Don’t stop there, but look out for “Double Cherry” from the Dublin artist, who borrowed the name from the US band. The song is an absolute indie pop gem, and we are looking forward to hearing more from her this year.

Nine Photos of Lisbon

On Day 2, we intended to take advantage of Lisbon’s proximity to the water and explore “the other side” of the river Tagus or Rio Tejo as the Portuguese call it. We strolled from our apartment (1) through the nearby Times Out Market (2), where we got our first -of many- Pastéis de Nata and hopped on a ferry (3) over to Cacilhas.
Less than fifteen minutes later, we explored the pier and marveled at the artful graffiti (3) that rivaled the ones found in Bushwick. We wondered, though, how this waterfront marvel of underused land wasn’t picked up by real estate developers. In places like New York, there would have been built luxurious condominiums already, and as such, taken the waterfront out of the hands of most. While we initially wanted to have lunch at the more famous Restaurante Ponto Final, we settled for the not-less-popular Atira te ao Rio (5) and enjoyed spectacular vistas (among them the Ponte 25 de Abril) while nibbling on delicious octopus and shrimp and drinking superb white wine, from Portugal, of course (7).
Something we noticed and liked a lot was that many restaurants/bars offered their own bottled water, flat or sparkling, filled in reusable glass bottles. This is the environmentally friendly, and economical way to do it, no? It tasted great and looked posh too, win, win!
On our way back to the ferry terminal, we stopped at one of the little street cafes and watched the commuters hassle by on their way home while sipping lovely vinho tinto and noshing on some complementary olives (9).
Slowing down is bliss!