I was on NPR Music’s New Music Friday podcast last week to talk about these albums, but since I’m convinced nobody actually listens to that (and Robin cut out many of my jokes I thought deserved an audience), here’s the first edition of New Music Friday: Director’s Cut for July 28, 2023.

Carly Rae Jepsen, The Loveliest Time

Carly Rae Jepsen is so good at making the kind of songs that build up to imaginary heights in the mind. Once you find yourself singing the same two lines over and over and over again in your head, it doesn’t really matter what the recorded song sounded like, now does it? The hook is embedded. I relistened to “Bad Thing Twice” and “Talking to Yourself” — two cuts from 2022’s The Loneliest Time, an album massively overshadowed by sharing a release day with Taylor Swift’s Midnights — on Friday and thought, huh, wasn’t there a busier, bigger, spikier music bed here? Wasn’t this vocal take more unhinged? No, that’s just how it exists in my mind. The song in my mind is a damn good song! Therefore I can’t be persuaded otherwise.

(The real gem on The Loneliest Time, btw, is “Go Find Yourself or Whatever,” which even in its title winks at the idea that Los Angeles is overtrodden ground for artists seeking inner wisdom, that this subdued version of Carly Rae is a bit of an acquired taste. Who turns to Carly Rae Jepsen for a ballad? Well, I’m just saying: Put this song on right this minute and tell me it doesn’t have that sort of malleable quality of great pop writing, the kind you can hear a million different people sing. Tell me you can’t hear this song in Phoebe Bridgers’ doubled-tracked whisper vocals, in Natalie Maines’ withering soprano, with The Chicks transforming that sitar solo into a fiddle or banjo one, some brainy rock band turning up the tempo and thrashing through the last minute. Anyway.)

Following time-honored tradition, The Loveliest Time, which came out July 28, is a B-sides collection less committed to the narrative framework of pandemic-inspired melancholy and instead devoted to whatever feels and sounds good. And apparently what feels good to CRJ is getting funky, borrowing some darkness from the dancefloor, listening to Tame Impala. Um, also dubstep? Letting someone rip a big ol’ arena rock guitar solo on “Stadium Love.” (I laughed out loud at this moment, I love it — it’s giving “Sweet Child O’ Mine.”)

This album is weird! And Pitchfork gave “Psychedelic Switch” Best New Music! You know, the song on the album that sounds inspired by the Bag Raiders’ “Shooting Stars,” which I only clocked because I had to get really specific about the meme blast radius of Shrek for a killed feature that lives in my drafts. (Lars contends it sounds like Daft Punk’s “One More Time,” so I guess this is one of those “vote in the comments below” situations.)

Either way, it kind of feels like we’re ready to rally around Carly Rae Jepsen again. I’m here for it.

Georgia, Euphoric

I became very, deeply obsessed with this song “About Work The Dancefloor” at the end of 2019 when the NPR Music staff were fighting to the death putting together their year-end list of Best Music, and I made my first appearance on New Music Friday to talk about Georgia’s 2020 album, Seeking Thrills. (Which I believe I called an ethnomusicological study of the dancefloor.)

Well! Now she’s teamed up with fellow ethnomusicology nerd, Rostam, for her third album. I think this is a fun match because Rostam’s solo music centers nostalgia and the warmth of memory, and Georgia has a real reverence for capturing the freedom of what dance music can make a person feel.

Speaking of freedom! “Give It Up For Love” sounds like a tribute to George Michael’s “Freedom 90” with that jaunty piano line and conga groove on the chorus. Euphoric is full of these little moments, highlighting different elements and melodic lines, and playing with space in the mix. I love the way the drums come in and out, or both of their voices move closer and further away in proximity to the listener on “Friends Will Never Let You Go;” the way Rostam’s voice floats through a gauzy curtain in the vocal interlude of “Keep On” before Georgia comes back in to wail the final chorus like a rocker. (And is it a an album co-produced by Rostam if he doesn’t sneak a sitar solo in there somewhere? This is twice now in just this one newsletter!)

I don’t think there’s anything as visceral and gripping as “About Work the Dancefloor” on Euphoric, but if this album was created without access to dance floors while still attempting to think about bodies in motion, I think that informs the airier, outdoor feel to the music.

Joni Mitchell, At Newport

Try as I might to fill them, the gaps in my musical history are vast. The only Joni Mitchell song I knew growing up, well, I didn’t actually know it was a Joni Mitchell song until 2016. Please raise your hand if you heard the Counting Crows cover of “Big Yellow Taxi” on the radio every day on the way to school throughout your early elementary school years! I also only discovered in December of last year when working on this adult contemporary pop feature for ELLE that these super slick “oooooh-bap-bap-baps” on the chorus are courtesy of Vanessa Carleton. The more you know! I made a playlist for that feature to sit alongside a more personal companion piece for the newsletter…but I think it is the makings of an essay for a book — one that will certainly touch upon the fact that my childhood was filled with the Rolling Stones and Eagles instead of Joni Mitchell, and what those stupid, stupid bands taught me about how men, including my father, see women! — so I will hold onto it for a bit longer.

But regardless of my familiarity with Joni Mitchell, I think to hear her sing “So many things I would have done / But clouds got in my way,” her sparrow-like soprano barrel-aged with time, or how a lyric like “I’ve looked at life from both sides now” transforms with the weight of the years, is to understand what an important document this Newport album is.

I wish Brandi Carlile was about 30% lower in the mix on these songs, but I think it’s a logistical choice that reflects Mitchell’s stamina. The verses she takes lead on are breathtaking, but the project is literally an ode to the collective. Joni Jams started without her musical participation, in the spirit of what a community can do for an individual. I’m choosing to listen with that idea in mind.

I’m not ready yet to take on her full catalog — I think hearing a song for the first time is a sacred moment, and I want to wait until it feels right — but I am very excited that Ann Powers’ Joni Mitchell book finally has a title and a release date as of last week!

Until then, I will be listening to “Big Yellow Taxi” and thinking about the alternate universe in which Mitchell is not such a jazz-head and decides to be a sci-fi and speculative fiction author in the vein of Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Post Malone, Austin

What I can say about Post Malone is that I don’t change the station when one of his songs comes on the radio, but also I’m not exactly choosing to play his music on purpose.

But this has been a surprisingly tepid year on the pop charts for the sort of pop-rap (or “melodic rap” if you are the Recording Academy) that Post Malone makes, the kind that’s been dominant since the EDM-to-hip-hop vibe shift of 2017. That calculation is anecdotal, as a person who knew her way around a house party in this era, backed up by a quick scan of the year-end Billboard singles from 2016 and 2017 — one of my favorite Wikipedia activities, if we’re being honest — and also just as a person always willing to talk about how Cardi B solidified hip-hop as the alpha genre in the commercial sphere, and this Sidney Madden feature, in particular. (I like to imagine a giant version of her stepping on all the lil EDM bros in one perfectly polished Louboutin.)

Or maybe, it’s just been a bad year for the men making this kind of music! SZA’s doing just fine on the charts, and so are a number of women rappers like Latto and Kali. (That’s the real story of the year FWIW. Flo Milli shit!) So if this album doesn’t get a single in the Top 10 — or this huge Travis Scott album, which has also been received poorly — I think that signals a real guard shift. I waited to send this until the Billboard Hot 100 chart updated, by the way, and the top 3 songs are all by country artists. Do with that what you will, but I will be generating at least three year-end pitches about movement on the charts this year.

Other releases

• I also talked about Beverly-Glenn Copeland’s The Ones Ahead on the episode, but I don’t have anything in-depth to say other than Diane Warren wishes. She wishes she had written these songs! These are some ballads. Listen to “Harbour” without crying challenge!

  • I like to think NPR played a small part in the Beverly-Glenn Copeland comeback when Caribou named him as an artist he was grateful for on All Things Considered’s Play It Forward series, which I edited at the time. His own follow-up interview was quite moving.

• I’m hoping to talk to Bethany Cosentino later this year for a bigger feature so I won’t write too much here, but I love her solo debut, Natural Disaster, with its clear-eyed lyricism and open arrangements. (For my Sheryl Crow girls!!!)

• I haven’t spent as much time as I’d like with Madeline Kenney’s A New Reality Mind, but it is jazzy, strange, and with jolts of touching the third rail.

And if you’re looking for a moody mystery film to watch

I was on Pop Culture Happy Hour last week to talk about Netflix’s They Cloned Tyrone, a difficult film to extol the virtues of without spoilers, though we tried. Short, spoilery newsletter review possibly to come in the future.