Reflecting on an old supergroup and first impressions for music this week

 So, I found out that in April 1991, Chris Cornell released the Temple of the Dog album, famous for the backing band being Pearl Jam and Eddie Vedder getting a guest vocal on “Hunger Strike.”  I often look back to the song “Say Hello 2 Heaven” myself, namely because there is a version on YouTube from a Chris Cornell tribute concert in January 2019 where Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard play the song with a different backing band and Miley Cyrus on lead vocals.  She delivers a powerhouse vocal performance, screaming much like Chris did on the original recording.  At the end, she quietly says “Thank you, Chris, for bringing us together, like you always did.”  Combined with the unique photo Billy Ray posted the day Chris’ life ended, I keep wondering if there’s some secret Cyrus-Cornell connection that I want to be privy to.  I know both Miley Cyrus and Toni Cornell are great soft rock/pop vocalists (and daughters of early 90s singers) that captured the emotions just right for me in the wake of losing my uncle in late 2018, but I can’t help but wonder if there’s more to it.  Maybe we’re not supposed to know, but it creates curiosity.  There were a lot of great songs typifying the style of 1991 Seattle Grunge on the album and I recommend “Pushing Forward Back,” “Hunger Strike” and “Say Hello 2 Heaven.”  I feel this brief chapter should be more appreciated among Grunge, Alternative Rock and Seattle music fans.

 

I also can’t help but urge people to speak out against whatever is in their life that hurts them.  Call the hotline if you need to, I don’t want to hear excuses to not get help, I got a ton of those through social media from a man who flat-out refused to get help until I stopped caring.  If there’s a bad relative or neighbor, do what you can to make yourself and your presence known.  Don’t be a victim of hate from within or outside, stand up, because YOU are enough.

 

 

I also just heard Nancy Wilson’s new album “You and Me.”  It’s amazing how it captured the late 60s-early 70s rock sound, a song like “The Battle of Evermore” wouldn’t feel out of place on it and this also featured a great party song with Duff McKagan and Taylor Hawkins and a cover of Paul Simon’s “The Boxer” with Sammy Hagar.  The intro track with Sue Ennis, a new version of “The Dragon” from her Roadcase Royale days and the instrumental “4 Edward” all gave it a classic rock sense that I had missed from other releases from artists active around that time.  It felt very much like Led Zeppelin, The Beatles and even a little Elton John.

 

The Dead Daisies complemented this release with a new version of their song “Like No Other,” proving why Glenn Hughes is a rock and roll master, and Duff’s daughter Grace released a single called “So Hyper” that was also a fun little amount of Hard Rock and Roll.  I think her previous singles were better, but all three suggest a good woman-sung hard rock album is in the near future.

May 7th Music Update

 

Last week featured a surprise new release from Miley Cyrus, teaming up with The Kid LAROI for a remix of a song called “Without You.”  This is also the fourth song with that title by the Cyrus family, as Billy Ray had two different ones on his releases Southern Rain and Time Flies, while Trace, Miley’s older half-brother, released one a few years back on one of his releases.  Mick Fleetwood and Friends also had several great standout blues tracks on their tribute to Peter Green, including Steven Tyler playing harmonica on a cover of “Stop Messing Around” for the second time in his career after the song was on Aerosmith’s “Honking On Bobo” album, sung by Joe Perry.

 

This week features two semi-local music releases, a major pop release and a classic rock/metal-related album.

 

Nancy Wilson-You and Me: An album I actually pre-ordered (in fact, may have paid for it already), this features guitarist Nancy Wilson of Heart doing a solo album with guest appearances from Sue Ennis (a co-writer of several Heart songs), fellow Seattle musicians Duff McKagan of Guns N Roses and drummer Taylor Hawkins of Foo Fighters and rock legend Sammy Hagar, who she has collaborated with twice for “All We Need Is An Island” and the Heart and Friends Christmas album.  It looks to be a fun release with Classic Rock elements.

 

Aly and AJ-a touch of the beat gets you up on your feet gets you out and then into the sun: The other local music release, the former Disney Channel standouts were raised in Seattle as well and even were vouched for by Heart.  This looks to be an interesting Alternative Pop release with the duo recording nice songs like “Slow Dancing” and “Symptom of your Touch.”

 

Bebe Rexha-Better Mistakes: a more mainstream pop album, this features several guest stars, including a duet with Doja Cat.  Bebe Rexha is a little underrated when it comes to pop music, but did perform at the Macy’s Parade last year.  She’s collaborated with Rita Ora and Charli XCX, as well.

 

Robin McAuley-Standing On The Edge: One of Michael Schenker’s go-to singers and the lead singer of Black Swan, Robin McAuley is releasing a solo hard rock album.  The two tracks released thus far as singles have been good, so hopefully, the whole album will be, as well.

Starting to live life again

 Yesterday, I finally got to a movie theater and saw Godzilla vs. Kong.  First the bad, this was the Monsterverse movie I liked the least of all four that have been made so far. I didn't care about the leading man and the Hollow Earth wasn't as good as something they built up for two movies felt like it should be. The positives? Millie Bobbie Brown's plot, the fights, the ending, them bringing the Skullcrawlers back and they got Judas Priest's "Breaking the Law" in a scene. A good, but not great, movie.

But beyond that, it was the first time I did something that made me feel like I was living since visiting my brother and sister-in-law briefly last year or watching Birds of Prey in theaters way back in February 2020.  And it made me realize some things.

Over the past year, I've been consumed by the inner demons of hopelessness.  The last writing, posted yesterday, was a good example of what a life without hope, without the belief life will get better, looks like.  When you force people to give up their future plans, they lose that sense that the future contains anything worth getting to, other than the afterlife.  It certainly doesn’t help that people descended into madness and re-awoke evil I’ve not heard of in at least decades.  We need hope, we need to believe there is an other side with our tragedies, there is a future where this hurt is going to be memories.  Without it, we can’t get past our sadness and anger.  And I lost it between the length, the politics, the natural disasters and the mass idiocy.  I lost the belief that there was a point where my life would have fun events out of my apartment in the future.  Hope is the thing that makes us truly live.  You can love, you can endure, but without hope, you don’t feel like you can escape the mire and everything painful becomes amplified to such a degree “the pain is so big you feel nothing at all.”  I am very thankful for the things that kept me afloat in the last year; 

 

 

Bumbleby, 

 

 

Edeleth 

 

 

and Shumako, three pairings of strong people who bring out the best in each other, bring out true compassion, love and tenderness.  My hope is that I can help make a future where LGBTQ+ people are free to be as open, honest and without fear as Edelgard and Dorothea were at the end of their B-rank, a world where people trust the name of Jesus again and a world where we share love and joy across cyberspace instead of judgment, bile and insults.

Rant about the current state of America and American Society/Culture

 I can’t cope with how racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic our culture and society are.  It’s deep-rooted anti-Christ attitudes that permit people to get away with abusing their spouse or committing sexual assault because they’re white, male and straight.  It’s pathetic, we fought the Nazis to prevent their attitude from going worldwide, we opposed Stalin for his murderous rhetoric and less than 100 years later, we adopt these very attitudes like never before against women, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latin Americans, Middle Easterners (especially Islamic ones) and the LGBTQ+ community.  We are one more bad election away from full-blown genocide of ideals and people who are not white, straight, hyper-conservative and male and those who worship them.  The Republicans opened Pandora’s Box and now refuse to be civil, battering you about online because you believe in provable reality while they absorb blatant lies and fabrications from a morbidly obese hyperactive Neo-Nazi who claims to be the Second Coming of Jesus.  They’ve dragged the worldwide community of Christianity so deep into the mire it doesn’t look like it will be ever freed as they fund tyrants in Africa who will murder you because you love someone of the same gender as yourself.  And every single damn time you try to question their behavior or insist their behavior in un-Christlike, they just shut you out and call you a Satanist.  The nation is losing Faith in Jesus because of these unholy monsters who sink to unfathomable depths in the name of the first dictator of the United States and are scrounging funds all across the Confederacy and using politicians there to ensure he won’t be the last as they stride towards a Fascist Dictatorship they will call a “theocracy” to legitimize it to their mindless voters who just want to stab Planned Parenthood employees and LGBTQ+ people while waving picket signs outside reconciling congregations, secretly planning to get C4 or Molotov Cocktails to destroy the build in the name of their racist, sexist, homophobic idols.  They distort the truth discovered in legal trials to make the victim the aggressor and claim this is truth, and they are so numerous it may very well have become truth.  If enough people believe a lie over the truth, it becomes truth to the masses, it becomes more real than the truth itself and the truth is buried and forgotten.

 

Don’t believe me?  Here’s some test sentences that are “truths” to the masses:

 

-Miley Cyrus is a whore

-Donald Trump did nothing wrong

-Amber Heard beat Johnny Depp on a regular basis

-Pat Robertson and Sean Hannity are the only trustworthy people on TV

-Tara Platt voiced two irredeemably bitchy characters

 

Here’s the truth from my perspective:

 

-Miley Cyrus is a pansexual genderfluid person born a woman who likes sex like most men do

-Donald Trump is a liar, a murderer, a rapist and deserves at the very least a life sentence in prison

-Johnny Depp beat Amber Heard at least 12 times

-Robertson and Hannity are aggressively partisan homophobes who want to corrupt the body of Christ and nobody on TV is wholly trustworthy

-Edelgard and Mitsuru were the only ones in the group who took the problems they saw seriously enough to want to do anything to stop it, even if that meant crossing moral boundaries they ultimately didn’t want to and regretted afterwards

 

But these truths are ultimately meaningless, because I encounter almost nobody who believes them.  I encounter far more people who believe the first set of statements, to the point I have to censor myself in the name of keeping civility.  I wish I could aggressively lecture them on how this pattern of behavior has ruined our country by burying what’s real and provable in favor of what we WANT to believe because we are sexist, racist and homophobic.  It bothers me to no end how we give males a free pass for wrongful behavior but are all-too-eager to crucify women if they step out of line ever-so-slightly.  It’s not right and it’s certainly not how Jesus lived.  I am so mad at what our society has become and want to scream at it over and over again until it’s fixed.  XXXX THIS BULLXXXX!