Articles by David Emery, mostly about marketing and music.
From: https://music.apple.com/gb/album/easy-street/6782098982?i=6782098983 Josh Homme is taller than you might think. Sure, he has a reputation for being a big guy, but somehow in person he manages to be greater than his actual height. It’s as though the rest of the world has been shrunk around him. I met him a handful of times several lifetimes ago when Queens of the Stone Age put out their first…
From: https://music.apple.com/gb/album/the-cure/1889992111?i=1889992123 Confusingly not about The Cure, even though Olivia Rodrigo has history with the lovable lipstick goths. I once traded emails with Robert Smith when working on a compilation of Paul McCartney covers which he was a part of, and unlike all of the other artists who both a) had managers to deal with the multitude of tedious…
From: https://music.apple.com/gb/album/heart-has-to-work-so-hard/1895982147?i=6765531270 My experience so far with Blondshell is one of slow and gradual appreciation — both 2023’s self-titled debut and last year’s ‘If You Asked For A Picture’ ended up being played on repeat. I wasn’t expecting a new album so soon — one is apparently coming later this year — but this first taste picks up right…
From: https://music.apple.com/gb/album/terms-of-estrangement/1878649394?i=1878649639 I am unsure which is a bigger obstacle to overcome in the quest for music credibility; having famous parents, or being a breakout actor. And yet Maya Hawke has both, and seems utterly unperturbed by the whole deal. She’s being making great lo-fi singer songwriter stuff for a while now, but this new album is a step…
Two decades ago today, I walked into an unassuming converted collection of terrace houses, somewhere in Wandsworth, South London, and began working in the music industry. It was purely by chance that I ended up there, really. Growing up, I had always wanted to work in music, but I never really knew how, or even where to start. I had no connections, no understanding of the industry beyond a vague…
From: https://aresluna.org/frame-of-preference/ Turns out, the Mac settings have lived a far more fascinating life than I imagined, have been redesigned many times, and can tell us a lot about the early history and the troubled upbringing of this interesting machine. Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels. This would be a wonderful trip down memory lane just by…
From: https://music.apple.com/gb/album/what-was-that/1809638073?i=1809638075 It would be unfair to say — like many others already have — that ‘What Was That’, the new single by Lorde from her upcoming fourth album ‘Virgin’, is a return to form. That would perpetuate the prevalent narrative that 2021’s ‘Solar Power’ was a dud. The internet has decided so, therefore it is so. Which is tiresome,…