New Music To Know This Week: Brittany Howard, The Highwomen & More

by Micheal Quinn

Ever since my first job at MTV working as a music programmer, I can’t prevent seeking to suit people with the tune they might like. So, I wrote an ebook referred to as Record Collecting for Girls and commenced interviewing musicians. The Music Concierge is a column in which I share the song I’m listening to that you might enjoy, with a touch context. Get the whole lot I’ve advocated this year on Spotify, follow me on Twitter or Facebook, and depart a comment underneath telling me what you are paying attention to this week.

Brittany Howard
Brittany Howard “Stay High”

If you had been looking for a running-magnificence hero, placed down the Bruce Springsteen cassette tapes and allowed’s communicate approximately Brittany Howard. The Alabama Shakes frontwoman is losing a solo album in September. Her video for “Stay High” is all approximately her father, who did shift paintings in a manufacturing unit, and the tiny moments Howard recollects of him.

Terry Crews performs her dad inside the video shot in her native land of Athens, AL, and features her own family and buddies’ cameos. Make no mistake: Howard is making Americana. However, it is also a rock song, soul music, and indie. Howard is one of those once-in-a-generation artists who bends music to her will; she can not be quantified as one component or some other. This feel-suitable gem gets you through any hard times and slaps a smile again for your face.

The High women “Redesigning Women.”

This is not a track. This isn’t a supergroup. It’s a motherfucking movement. Maren Morris, Brandi Carlile, Amanda Shires, and Natalie Hemby are the Highwomen (with a few assist from producer Dave Cobb and Jason Isbell co-writing some tracks). And they may be right here to burn down the concept that ladies stick out/do not healthy in on us of a radio.

The song jogs my memory of blistering ’90s country hits like Mindy McCready’s “Guys Do It All the Time” and Deana Carter’s “Did I Shave My Legs For This?” and Shania Twain’s “Any Man of Mine.” The one distinction is that the Highwomen (a takeoff at the ’70s u . S . A . Supergroup the Highway Men) are brazenly feminist, inclusionist, and about equality. There’s no conflict of the sexes right here. It’s approximately letting ladies share their perspective and giving girls a voice in a layout that continues shutting them down.

Hayley Kiyoko “I Wish”

Ahhhhh, Hayley Kiyoko is the lower back, and her new video has a totally robust The Craft vibe. Do I have to inform you greater than that to make you watch it? If so: it’s about a love it is now not being returned in pretty the incorrect way, and that “I wish, I desire, I desire” that keeps repeating is setting it on target to be the track you cannot stop being attentive to for the rest of the summertime. In a fight with your S.O.? Just locating it tough to in shape with a person who is not an asshole on Bumble? Yeah, you need this track.

Sarah Jaffe “Lay Low (Take Care)”

Look, going through a breakup is difficult. Going via existence is occasionally hard. Sarah Jaffe, who dropped two new EPs, nails the feeling with this pep talk masquerading as a tune. The Dallas local has created an anthem for each person who does now not have our shit together, which is me, a long way more often than I care to confess.

The Messiah, composed in 1742, appeared by way of many as the best-written oratorio that has ever been written. The widespread piece incorporates a few fifty sections of song and performance that take nearly 3 hours to carry out and celebrate fully. The piece’s maximum marvelous issue is that it became composed in a mere twenty-four days, achieved by Handel locking himself in his home, refusing to be interrupted by anyone. During this time, it becomes pronounced that Handel slightly ate something and slept little or no.

This was yet every other nod to the dedication that Handel turned into recognized to have, and also performed into the factor that Handel had certainly have become a part of his paintings, and consequently continually made positive that his complete interest and concept have been positioned into the song because it changed into composed. It could have been atypical for Handel to jot down one of these religiously profound pieces considering that he himself become now not a very non secular person till the later part of his existence; even though there are bills that lay declare to a “divine source” because of the inspirational and motivational element for the composition of the work.

So profound changed into the paintings that Handel himself self-stated that “I did see Heaven earlier than me, and the tremendous God himself.” At the same time, he had finished the broadly identified Hallelujah chorus. The paintings have had a lasting effect on no longer handiest the composer’s reputation as one of the greatest advancers of the musical composition spectrum, however also on the works of composers who’ve been stimulated by way of the works of Handel; Mozart being a person that had to emerge as extraordinarily influenced with the aid of Handel and especially the Messiah.

But there also have been effects of this first-rate composition at the subculture of the paintings. The performance issue of the way it moves humans to sense something almost religious every time it’s miles heard. It is stated that in the primary performance of this composition in London, that the contemporary King of England, King George II, felt so moved and religiously compelled to face at some stage in the singing of the Hallelujah refrain that others fell in keeping with the king (as become the protocol of subjects to their king) and stood as properly.

This is a lifestyle that maintains to this very day for the duration of the performances of Handel’s Messiah. As you can see, Handel had a long-lasting legacy on track and the compositional factors of the song. Handel’s determination to his existence of song and the maintenance of an enduring legacy has allowed Handel to surely in no way leave us. His outcomes have been felt to this very day thru the standing of the target audience all through the Messiah, to the compositional nods that composers deliver to Handel of their works.

Handel is a person that proved to many that so long as there exists the choice to attain, the object in their choice can be reached. Handel’s lifestyles there appeared to be full of adversity from the start. From his father not trying Handel to take part in a career full of tune, to his struggles with changing musical patterns, the once-in-a-while-awkward positions that Handel located himself in related to arguments, Handel persisted through all of it. It changed into no longer until the give up of his existence that Handel confirmed signs and symptoms of a frail man or woman no longer capable of retaining.

Blindness became an excessive blow to Handel’s career, being that the manufacturing of and revision of big-scale works changed into something that might no longer be done. Handel persevered in doing what he had achieved all of his life and find new approaches to live applicable and present-day with the musical wishes and did so via using depended on pals that did a maximum of the dictation paintings for Handel.

Still, eventual overall blindness left Handel in such adverse health that even that had to come to a stop. On April 14, 1759, it becomes sooner or later that Handel left his body shape and become now not the loss of life of Handel, but turned into the start of a long-lasting legacy of Handel the musical stylings of what turned into to return.

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