2/5/2021 Music Releases and Possibly new hobbies

 

Last week was a surprising week in terms of new releases, with both Classic Rock band Cheap Trick announcing a new album scheduled for an early April release and pop singer Selena Gomez announcing a Spanish-language album, or rather EP, due to its length.  Ann Wilson of Heart released a solo single called “Tender Heart” while Kesha released a collaboration with Sam Feldt called “Stronger.”

 

This week features two releases with Seattle music connections, I’ll start with the one I teased last week:

 

Foo Fighters-Medicine At Midnight: Foo Fighters, if you don’t know, is a band formed in the mid-90s by former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, who sings and plays guitar for the band.  They are famous for modern hard rock and punk rock songs like “Monkey Wrench” and “My Hero.”  Dave Grohl is well-connected in the music business; he created the song “Cut Me Some Slash” with the other remaining members of Nirvana and Paul McCartney.  This album features the hard rocking song “Shame Shame” as well as “Waiting on a War,” a song written after Grohl’s daughter asked him not terribly long ago if there was going to be a war, at which point he knew she was feeling the same fear over international politics he did 40 years prior.  At this point, my question feels less like “is there going to be a war” and more like “is there going to be a second Civil War?”  What’s worse, oftentimes I feel splitting the country is the only way our two political parties can co-exist now.

 

The Prog Collective-Worlds On Hold: The Prog Collective is a supergroup that occasionally records albums made up of various musicians from progressive rock and progressive metal bands.  What captured my attention to this release was that Geoff Tate sings at least one of the songs, the first single, which also features guitarist Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal.  This release will also feature at least Todd Rundgren (who famously sang “I Don’t Want To Work/I just Want To Bang On The Drum All Day”), Joe Lynn Turner (who sang with Rainbow and Deep Purple, and as of last week, the Michael Schenker group) and covers of “Whiter Shade of Pale” and “Nights in White Satin.”  The first is a bit of a favorite of mine, since it was covered by two of my favorite singers, Glenn Hughes and Sammy Hagar.  Who knows, after this album, it might be three.

 

I’m finding it hard to deal with stress these days, like I had my limit over the last five years and can’t deal with any more.  Due to that, I am considering stopping some of my media-based hobbies because I hate where the plots go sometimes.  To that end, I would like new, stress-free, non-media-based hobbies, does anyone have any suggestions?