Fiona Apple performing “Paper Bag” Live on the 24th of March, 2000 on the Jay Leno Show
The inspiration for Paper Bag stemmed from a moment Fiona Apple shared with her father while driving through Los Angeles. Returning from a recording session for Tidal, she glanced out the window and saw what she initially believed to be a dove. Instantly, she began attributing meaning to the sight, finding a sense of relief amid what had been a challenging recording process. The Tidal sessions had been particularly difficult for Apple, as she was accustomed to working alone but now had to navigate the constraints of a professional studio environment with a full team. In that fleeting moment, the sight of the bird lifted her spirits, giving her hope that things would improve. However, as she continued to watch, the “dove” began to fall and it was, in fact, just a plastic bag. The image stayed with her, becoming a powerful metaphor for the disappointments she had experienced in life, particularly in relationships. When writing for When the Pawn..., she revisited this idea, using it to illustrate the recurring theme of misplaced hope. The plastic bag became a paper bag, both for its poetic resonance and because it simply sang better.
#Music #FionaApple
Promotional Footage of Fleetwood Mac performing “You Make Lovin’ Fun” in 1976 “Rumors” was Fleetwood Mac’s masterpiece. Each song on the album is conclusive proof that the band could turn emotional chaos, affairs, and romantic tension into perfect Pop music without losing an ounce of humanity in the process.
Yet somehow, out of that dysfunction came “You Make Loving Fun,” one of the warmest and most effortlessly joyful songs on the entire album. What makes the track so fascinating is the contradiction sitting at its centre. Christine McVie wrote the song about her relationship with the band’s lighting director while still surrounded by the emotional wreckage of her breakup with John McVie. That tension quietly hangs underneath the song’s brightness. The groove feels smooth, playful, and comforting, but there’s still emotional complexity buried inside the arrangement. Musically, the song captures Fleetwood Mac operating with frightening precision. Christine McVie’s electric piano gives the track its warmth and movement while Lindsey Buckingham’s guitar work remains restrained enough to let the rhythm breathe naturally. John McVie and Mick Fleetwood lock into a groove so fluid that the song almost feels weightless. Nothing is forced and everything moves instinctively. In an interview with MusicRadar, producer Ken Caillat recalled that Nicks and Buckingham were engaged in “vicious name calling”: “The tape would start rolling and they’d sing, ‘Yooooooou make loving fun,’ just beautiful, two little angels. The tape would stop and they’d be calling each other names again. They didn’t miss a beat.”
That’s why “You Make Loving Fun” remains one of the defining moments on “Rumours.” Fleetwood Mac understood that great Pop music does not need to erase emotional damage to feel uplifting. Sometimes the tension underneath the surface is exactly what gives the music life.
#Music #FleetwoodMac
Celebrating 60 Years of Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys with @sayonaracupcake
“Pet Sounds” forced Pop music to grow up emotionally.
Long before Brian Wilson created this album, much of mainstream Pop music still revolved around youth, romance, rebellion, and immediacy. Even great records often prioritized singles over emotional continuity. “Pet Sounds” shattered that limitation completely. Brian approached the album less like a collection of songs and more like an emotional story arc built around loneliness, insecurity, spiritual exhaustion, love, vulnerability, and the fear of adulthood itself. The emotional honesty throughout the record altered what people believed Pop music could express.
What makes it so revolutionary is the level of control inside the arrangements. He treated the recording studio like a compositional instrument, layering orchestral textures and unconventional instrumentation with precision. All of this was manipulated into the emotional architecture of the album. Every sound exists to deepen emotional atmosphere.
But the real genius of “Pet Sounds” lies in contradiction. The music often sounds beautiful, warm, and comforting while the lyrics underneath it quietly unravel psychologically. Songs like “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” carry levels of alienation and emotional fragility that were almost unheard of in mainstream Pop music during 1966. Brian was documenting emotional disconnection in real time.
That’s why the album changed music history. The Beatles heard “Pet Sounds” and responded with “Sgt. Pepper.” Countless artists suddenly realized albums could function as immersive emotional worlds rather than simple hit collections. You can trace the influence of “Pet Sounds” across Chamber Pop, Psychedelia, Dream Pop, and modern studio production philosophy itself.
Most importantly, “Pet Sounds” still feels human beneath all its innovation. That’s the reason it survives while so many “important” albums become museum pieces. Brian Wilson took the emotional confusion inside his own head and somehow transformed it into one of the most beautiful records ever made.
#Music #TheBeachBoys
🍃 Sweet leaf… and somehow I ended up with another painting of the Prince of darkness! Really enjoyed bringing both Ozzy eras to life over the past year. Huge thanks to @ray.witten for trusting me with this commission which I’m finally revealing now
more in the next post 🦇
🖤 Prints are available
🦇website ZINA.ART (link in bio)
🦇 Message for enquiries
#ozzyosbourne #princeofdarkness #ozzy
#backtothebeginning #ozzyfinalconcert blacksabbath
𝘙𝘖𝘉 𝘎𝘙𝘌𝘛𝘛𝘖𝘕
𝘙𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦
𝘍𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘙𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘴 + 𝘑𝘰𝘺 𝘋𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 + 𝘕𝘦𝘸 𝘖𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘳 + 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘏𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘢
Thinking of Rob Gretton … 🤍🖤
Robert Gretton, manager of Joy Division and New Order, partner in and co-director of Factory Records and a founding partner of The Haçienda.
Added Neil Tennant’s of the Pet Shop Boys thoughts on Rob. Special thanks to @postpunkonvinyl for the clip.
📸 𝘒𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘯 𝘊𝘶𝘮𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘴 | 𝘈𝘯𝘵𝘰𝘯 𝘊𝘰𝘳𝘣𝘪𝘫𝘯
🏭 @thefactusproject | @factusmediaworks
#RobGretton #JoyDivision #NewOrder #FactoryRecords #TheHacienda
The Cranberries performing “Linger” Live at the Astoria in London in 1994
The origins of “Linger” can be traced to a demo of music created by guitarist Noel Hogan long before the Cranberries had Dolores O’Riordan as their front woman. The original set of lyrics for the song were penned by a bloke named Niall Quinn who was the group’s first singer. When Dolores joined the band she contributed some ideas turning it into a song of regret based on a soldier she once fell in love with. The first version of the song was recorded at their manager’s studio in Limerick, Ireland and it was one of the three songs included on a demo they distributed to local records stores, which found their way to various record companies. Drummer Fergal Lawler recalled the process in an interview, saying: “It was a Sunday afternoon. She arrived with a keyboard under her arm, just set it up and played a few songs. We couldn’t really hear her because she was singing through a guitar amp or something. I gave her a lift up to the bus stop and I was saying, ‘Will we see you next week?’ We gave her a tape of the music for ‘Linger’, which she took with her. The following week she came back, and she had lyrics written out and melodies and she sang along to what we were playing, and it was like, ‘Oh, my God. She’s great’.”
#Music #TheCranberries
PJ Harvey performing “Down By The Water” Live on …Later With Jools Holland in ’95
When PJ Harvey released Down by the Water, American radio didn’t suddenly develop taste. It flinched and played it anyway.
This was her breakthrough, yes, but not because it courted acceptance. Because it smuggled something unsettling into plain sight and dared the audience to sit with it. Lyrically, the song circles a crime most people instinctively look away from: a woman who drowns her daughter, then returns to the water whispering, “little fish, big fish swimming in the water…come back here, man, gimme my daughter.” It’s not a narrative arc. It’s a loop. Guilt without resolution. Grief without redemption. The horror is ritualized in plain sight. Harvey herself resisted pinning it down. She refused to label the song, admitted she didn’t fully know what it meant to her, and left it deliberately open. That wasn’t evasiveness. That was discipline. Explanation would have collapsed the tension. Certainty would have made the listener safe. This song doesn’t want safety. It wants participation. Musically, the control is surgical. It opens with a voice and a heavy organ played by Harvey herself grounding the song in something ancient and bodily. As it unfolds, percussion creeps in, then drums, then synthetic textures, then orchestral weight. The arrangement doesn’t explode. It accumulates, like guilt does. Blues phrasing bleeds into electronica, tradition corroded by modern unease.
Parts of the song drew inspiration from Lead Belly’s version of “Salty Dog Blues,” but not as an homage. As contamination. Folk history repurposed into something predatory, maternal, and wrong. This isn’t a root revival. It’s roots rotting in real time. That’s why “Down by the Water” still works where so many “dark” songs don’t. It doesn’t posture. It doesn’t moralize. It doesn’t resolve. It understands that some stories survive precisely because they don’t come with lessons attached.
#Music #PJHarvey
Alanis Morissette performing “You Oughta Know” Live at the Prince’s Trust Masters Of Music in 1996
“The most wonderful thing for me as a writer is to hear someone’s voice in the room, and she was constantly auditioning how to do it, so at the end of the night on ‘You Oughta Know,’ we had a track, and she just went out and sang it one time, and since I was the engineer too, I was hoping I’d got it. It’s not the best recorded vocal in the world - some of it is too hot - but that’s the only time she ever sang it in the studio. Even when we were getting ready to put the record out, all those vocals were the original vocals. I’ve never done anything that authentically live. Really, that’s what it was, a live vocal, but she’s so damn good that she could pull it off. There was some talk about refining things and re-doing things, but she was adamant that there was something about the moment of creation when we did it.”
Songwriter & Producer Glen Ballard talking about this song in an interview with Songfacts
#Music #alanismorissette
Steve Miller Band performing “Fly Like An Eagle” Live on The Midnight Special
“Fly Like An Eagle” sources its origins to a live performance the band did of the song at a gig in 1973 at the Felt Forum in New York City. The earliest version of the song was way more bluesy with less funk-inspired rhythm and the guitar taking over where the synthesizer parts eventually prevailed. Steve Miller once described earlier iterations of the song as being a “15- or 20-minute thing that went in all kinds of different places because of the freedom of the whole psychedelic music scene.” The song was eventually re-recorded for its eponymous album three years later. When initial recording sessions proved unsuccessful they reconvened at Pacific Union in San Francisco with the addition to Joachim Young on Hammond organ. Once this configuration achieved a satisfactory take, Miller mixed the song down to a portable 3M eight-track machine and conducted guitar and vocal overdubs at his home studio in Novato, California. He used a Fender Stratocaster connected to a Fender Bassman with an Echoplex to provide a staggered triplet echo effect. For the vocals, Miller sang his parts through an Electro-Voice RE20 and compressed the audio signal with a Shure Level Loc.
Later on when asked about the inclusion of the synthesizer on “Fly Like An Eagle”, Miller mentioned that he had experimented with electronic music and sound collages in the 1960s with tape recorders and the Echoplex, having been inspired by the work of La Monte Young and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The synthesizer was recorded in one take after the track was mixed. “Fly Like an Eagle” was mixed on three different occasions as Miller “didn’t want to put that song out until it was really right.” When the song was receiving its final mix, the tracks were transferred using a tape that had been bulk erased, resulting in a repeated beeping noise that occurred during the fade-out of the song.
Source: - “I Didn’t Want That Kind of Dead Studio Perfection”: Steve Miller Reveals the Recording Secrets Behind His ‘70s Smash “Fly Like an Eagle” for Guitar Player Magazine
#Music #SteveM
Sinéad O’Connor performing “Troy” Live at the 1988 Pinkpop Festival
Sinéad O’Connor sang like someone ripping emotional truth directly out of herself in real time.
What made her voice so extraordinary was not technical perfection alone, but the complete absence of emotional protection. There was nothing polished or emotionally distant about the way she sang. Every crack, every whisper, every sudden eruption of intensity felt exposed and painfully human. She understood something many vocalists never do: vulnerability itself could become overwhelming when delivered with absolute conviction. Her voice carried contradiction constantly. It could sound fragile and confrontational within the same phrase. Soft, but spiritually enormous. There was a rawness rooted deeply in Irish Folk tradition, yet she could channel the emotional force of Gospel, the intimacy of singer-songwriter confession, and the anger of Punk music without ever sounding stylistically trapped by any of them.
That’s why performances like this remain so devastating decades later. Sinéad O’Connor never sounded like she was performing emotion. She sounded like she was surviving it.
#Music #SinéadOConnor
King Crimson performing “Larks Tongue in Aspic” Live on West German Television Show “Beat Club”
“Larks’ Tongues in Aspic” sounds like King Crimson tearing Progressive Rock apart just to rebuild it into something colder, stranger, and infinitely more dangerous. By 1973, Progressive Rock had become obsessed with grandeur and it left an impression that the movement was all about grandeur with its symphonic arrangements, fantasy imagery, technical exhibitionism, and endless complexity disguised as sophistication. King Crimson were determined to dismantle this ideology and from that destruction came ‘Larks’ Tongues in Aspic’.” This violent piece of music refuses to conform to anything the listener would consider elegant, safe, or emotionally stable.Instead it’s built like a collision between Jazz improvisation, chamber music, Heavy Metal, and avant-garde experimentation. Robert Fripp’s vision was to drag Progressive Rock beyond technical sophistication and into something physically and psychologically confrontational. He approached the composition like psychological pressure weaponized through sound where silence, dissonance, improvisation, and rhythmic violence constantly collide against one another without ever fully resolving.
“Larks’ Tongue in Aspic” still sounds so unsettling decades later. King Crimson weren’t interested in trying to make Progressive Rock sound bigger. They were trying to see how far they could push it before the entire thing collapsed in on itself.
#Music #KingCrimson
📕 33 1/3 IS OUT NOW📕
We’re excited to announce that our debut album now has its own book in the 33 1/3 series !!
Special thanks goes out to Nic Brown @nic___brown for his thoughtful writing, 33 1/3 @331.3books and Bloomsbury Academic for including us in their catalogue and amazing series of books.
🗓️ OUT NOW
👉 Who’s going to pick one up?
💻 Avoid scalpers and scammers — use the official book purchase links 🔗
➡️ Amazon Here: /Violent-Femmes-33/dp/B0FJ915W1L
➡️ Author Nic Brown on IG /nic brown/?hl=en
➡️ 33 1/3 books on IG /331.3books/?hl=en
#ViolentFemmes #333books #MusicHistory #MusicLibrary
