The 11-track release is a masterclass in modern but reflective music, hearkening back to ’70s-inspired pop grooves with a smooth layer of Clairo’s characteristic soul.

Clairo previously landed on many a cool kid’s aesthetic playlist with lovely tracks such as “Sofia” and “Bags.” She continues along the themes of love and sexuality here, blending playful melodies with astute lyrics that observe the heart’s volatile conditions: wanting, waiting, accepting, and exploring.

The standout song is “Sexy to Someone,” a repeat-worthy track on which Clairo sings about wanting to be wanted. “I want afterglowing and when I call a car / Send me eyes with the knowing that I could pull it off,” Clairo croons against an upbeat drum shuffle and soft synthesizer stabs. Desiring to be sexy to someone is sexier than singing about simply being sexy. These are the savvy songwriting levels that Clairo understands and delivers.

If you want something to move your body to, steer toward “Add Up My Love,” a certified bop by Clairo standards, quicker in pace than her usual lilt and a track that shows off the singer’s vocal ability.

Credit must go to Clairo and her “Charm” co-producer Leon Michaels (of The Dap-Kings and El Michels Affair) for their attention to analog. Clairo and company brought together a live ensemble of horns, woodwinds and vintage synthesizers to create a sound that is lush and respectful of the pre-digital process.

Clairo fans are likely to love this release. Newcomers to her music will be glad they found her. Clairo remains a standout artist among the current cadre of indie pop practitioners for her quality lyricism and consistent melodic inventiveness. She’s a cut above one-trick ponies that deliver fleeting earworms.

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But just how poetic is it? Is it even possible to close read lyrics like poems, divorced from their source material?

The Associated Press spoke to four experts to assess how Swift’s latest album stacks up to poetry.

IS TAYLOR SWIFT A POET?
Allison Adair, a professor who teaches poetry and other literary forms at Boston College, says yes.

“My personal opinion is that if someone writes poems and considers themself a poet, then they’re a poet,” she says. “And Swift has demonstrated that she takes it pretty seriously. She’s mentioned (Pablo) Neruda in her work before, she has an allusion to (William) Wordsworth, she cites Emily Dickinson as one of her influences.”

She also said her students told her Swift’s B-sides — not her radio singles — tend to be her most poetic, which is true of poets, too. “Their most well-known poems are the ones that people lock into the most, that are the clearest, and in a way, don’t always have the mystery of poetry.”

Professor Elizabeth Scala, who teaches a course on Swift’s songbook at the University of Texas at Austin, says “there is something poetical about the way she writes,” adding that her work on “The Tortured Poets Department” references a time before print technology when people sang poems. “In the earliest stages of English poetry, they were inseparable,” she says. “Not absolutely identical, but they have a long and rich history together that is re-energized by Taylor Swift.”

“It’s proper to talk about every songwriter as a poet,” says Michael Chasar, a poetry and popular culture professor at Willamette University.

“There are many things musicians and singer-songwriters can do that poetry cannot,” Adair says, citing melisma, or the ability to hold out a single syllable over many notes, as an example. Or the nature of a song with uplifting production and morose lyricism, which can create a confusing and rich texture. “That’s something music can do viscerally and poetry has to do in different ways.”

“She might say her works are poetry,” adds Scala. “But I also think the music is so important — kind of poetry-plus.”

As for current U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón? “Poetry and song lyrics aren’t exactly the same (we poets have to make all our music with only words and breath),” she wrote to the AP. “But having an icon like Taylor bring more attention to poetry as a genre is exciting.”

HOW SWIFT USES P
OETRY ON THE SONG “FORTNIGHT”

Scala sees Swift’s influences on “The Tortured Poets Department” as including Sylvia Plath, a confessional poet she previously drew inspiration from on songs like “Mad Woman” and “Tolerate It.”

“Fortnight” uses enjambed lines (there’s no end stop, or punctuation at the end of each line) and Scala points out the dissonance between the music’s smoothness and its lyrics, like in the line “My mornings are Mondays stuck in an endless February.” “It kind of encapsulates boredom with the ordinary and then she unleashes a kind of tension and anger in the ordinary in those verses,” she says. In the verses, she says Swift “explodes the domestic,” and that fights up against the music, which is “literary.”

Swift’s lyrics, too, allow for multi-dimensional readings: “I touched you” could be physicality and infidelity in the song, Scala says, or it could mean it emotionally — as in, I moved you.

Swift has long played with rhyme and unexpected rhythm. “She’ll often establish a pattern and won’t satisfy it — and that often comes in a moment of emotional ache,” says Adair.

On “Fortnight,” it appears in a few ways. Adair points out that the chorus is more syncopated than the rest of the song — which means Swift uses many more syllables for the same beat. “It gives this rushed quality,” she says.

“Rhyming ‘alcoholic’ and ‘aesthetic,’ she plays a lot with assonance. It is technically a vowel-driven repetition of sounds,” she adds. There’s a tension, too, in the title “Fortnight,” an archaic term used for a song with contemporary devices. “There’s an allusion to treason, and some of the stuff is hyper romantic, but a lot of it is very much a kind of unapologetic, plain speech. And there’s something poetic about that.”

“From the perspective of harnessing particular poetic devices, this kind of trucks in familiar metaphors for one’s emotional state,” Chasar says of “Fortnight.”

He says the speaker is “arrested in the past and a future that could’ve been,” using a dystopic image of American suburbs as a metaphor and “cultivating a sense of numbness, which we hear in the intonation of the lyrics.”

“But the speaker is so overwhelmed by their emotional state that they can’t think of any other associations with politically charged lyrics like ‘treason’ and ‘Florida’ and ‘lost in America’ that many of us would,” he says.

The title “Fortnight,” he adds, “is totally poetic. It’s also a period of 14 days, or two weeks. For most of us ‘lost in America,’ it means a paycheck.”

WHAT ARE SOME OTHER POETIC MOMENTS ON THE ALBUM?

“She’s making references to Greek mythology,” say Scala, like in “Cassandra,” which is part of a surprise set of songs Swift dropped Friday.

The title references the daughter of king of Troy, who foretold the city’s destruction but had been cursed so that no one believed her.

“She’s the truth teller. No one wants to believe, and no one can believe,” she says.

Swift is “thinking in terms of literary paradigms about truth telling.”

Adair looks to “So Long, London”: from the chiming, high school harmonies that open it to a plain first verse, “quiet and domestic,” she says.

“That mismatch is very poetic, because it’s pairing things from two different tonal registers, essentially, and saying they both have value, and they belong together: The kind of high mindedness and the high tradition and the kind of casual every day. That’s something the Beat poets did too, re-redefining the relationship between the sacred and profane.”

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Balvin was the only artist at last month’s Las Vegas Grand Prix to perform twice doing their motorsport weekend — for him, it was an opportunity to participate in a global sport as a global musician. It also allowed him to tease his latest single, the reggaeton track “Amigos,” on the Sphere, the largest LED screen on Earth.

A one point during the week, an ad with a photo number projected on the Sphere read “J Balvin doesn’t need more friends.”

Fans could’ve misinterpreted it as a response to a verse on Bad Bunny’s track “Thunder y Lightning.” On it, the Puerto Rican star says “Ustedes me han visto con los mismo mientras ustedes son amigo de todo el mundo como Balvin.” In English, it translates to “You guys have seen me with the same people while you all are friends with the whole world like Balvin.”

Balvin says “Amigos” has nothing to do with Bad Bunny. “I ain’t got time for that. I got a lot of love for the guy,” he says. “The friend that I know at the time was amazing, you know? So, like, he might he going through something.

“I see him as like a little brother, so it’s like being mad at your little brother, so, like, I’m not going to take it personal.” “Amigos,” he said, “is not a response.”

The reality is that “Amigos” is a return to what Balvin calls “romantic reggaeton,” the music that made his fans fall in love with him in the first place. He says that when he dropped the fiery “Dientes” in September, the ‘00s club-inspired Latino urbano track which interpolates Usher’s “Yeah!,” his fans were expecting reggaeton — his “original sound,” as he puts it. Now, he’s given them exactly what they want.

Balvin sings “Fue la culpa de la rutina, de que lo nuestro se jodiera. Yo, tuve que soltarte aunque eso me doliera” on the sentimental single, which translates in English to “It was the fault of routine, that what we had was messed up. I had to let you go enough though it hurt.”

With “Amigos,” J Balvin says he’s “going back to his roots.” Thematically, it is about how “routine can kill the love,” he says — that sometimes a relationship can become more like a friendship, and “the passion is gone, and that is something that happens to everyone.”

“But the fact is, you can also reverse that and make it work once again,” he adds — and he hopes that everyone likes it. “Music doesn’t have a formula. It’s the only business that you drop the product before anyone tastes them. So it’s a risk, but it is part of the game.”

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Is it the viral, U.K. garage-sampling TikTok hits “Break It Off” or “Pain”? Or is it more recent — an inescapable song of the summer, “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2,” featuring Ice Spice? Or “Angel,” her contribution to the Mark Ronson-produced “Barbie” soundtrack? Or something else entirely?

There are countless ways in, but the destination is the same: sugary hooks that satiate, her sweet soprano carrying an addictive chorus above hybrid production. And as of Friday, it’s culminated in “Heaven Knows.” The debut full-length record from the U.K. star, who keeps her real name hidden, features 13 tracks she also co-produced.

“Heaven Knows” is sometimes hyperpop, sometimes ornamented with the sound of pan flutes (“Blue”), sometimes 2000s emo-by-way-of- My Chemical Romance -inspired church organs (that’s “Another life,” featuring the Nigerian artist Rema of “Calm Down” fame), and sometimes something else entirely.

Any kind of momentum after virality is rarer than the initial 15 minutes of fame. PinkPantheress is an exception because of the tools she wields: Her songs, up until this point, have been remarkably short — a minimalistic sensibility born from her understanding of what works on TikTok, often crafting snippets of a track, seeing if it works on the platform, and building them out from there. It’s sharpened her ability to identify a hook that works in a song about failed adventures in love (or romance, more specifically, which she name checks on “The aisle” and throughout “True Romance”) as well as death.

The latter is apparent on “Ophelia,” which begins with harps and finds its coda in the sound of a bubbling brook, a direct reference to the demise met by the doomed noblewoman in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”

In the middle of “Heaven Knows” is “Internet Baby (interlude),” led by a memorable hook and the repeated refrain of “I am not your internet baby.” In the context of the song, it is a declaration to a needy love interest, but in the context of the album, it is a reminder that PinkPantheress ‘ online successes have offline resonance.

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Somehow, that’s not even the most devastating moment.

That arrives later in the track, when mournful strings carry the song to its coda like a country dirge. Sheeran has never been one to shy away from explicit emotionality, but something’s different on “Autumn Variations,” his sixth studio album and the first since his series of releases named after mathematical symbols. (The first was his 2011 debut, “+.” His last, released in May of this year, was titled “−“, or “Subtract.” ) Is this the end of an era, or the beginning of something novel?

Inspiration came from an unusual place: composer Edward Elgar’s “Enigma Variations,” in which every composition was about a different friend. Sheeran’s “Autumn Variations,” instead, centers on his relationships.

“Last autumn, I found that my friends and I were going through so many life changes. After the heat of the summer, everything either calmed, settled, fell apart, came to a head, or imploded,” he said in a statement. “When I went through a difficult time at the start of last year, writing songs helped me understand my feelings and come to terms with what was going on.”

Chalk it up to fatherhood, marriage, or simply residual effects of a global health crisis that has altered the psychology of humanity in increasingly complex and unearthed ways, but it makes for some of the best songs of Sheeran’s career, from the lo-fi “Midnights”, the lamenting reverbed riff of “Punchline,” to the Billy Joel -channeling “The Day I Was Born.”

“Autumn Variations” was produced solely by The National’s Aaron Dessner (Taylor Swift, Gracie Abrams), who Sheeran worked with on “-.”

And sure, perhaps that can account for some of the big existential queries here, met with production of a similar depth. Dessner’s National-isms appear in surprising corners, like in the closing minute of “Amazing,” an otherwise uptempo track about the challenges of mood regulation.

Sheeran and Dessner have proven to be a marvelous partnership. In the past, Sheeran has spent time demonstrating a masterful understanding of taking pop architecture and marrying it with EDM, reggaeton, Afropop, however you’d describe the sonic idiosyncrasies of Jai Paul. But here, with Dessner, he’s returned home to his folk-y pop craft, the world he knows best. And with obvious evolution. And a bit of depression.

If there is a cultural schmaltz associated with Sheeran’s biggest radio hits, they do not apply here. (Well, with few exceptions – like the “Friends” reference in “American Town.”) Surely that’s enough reason to dig in.

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Meghan Trainor is back with that doo-wop style of music that made her famous, but this time adding a twist to it.

Her new album “Takin’ It Back,” isn’t your usual journey of self-love, this is a more mature Trainor. Riding the ups and downs we all secretly experience, moments of bursting confidence to self-doubt and sadness with a sprinkle of reassuring reality.

Like in her single “Don’t I Make It Look Easy,” Meghan talks about filtering the truth and showing the best part of herself to the world, even when it just feels like a straight-out lie.

Since her last album, Trainor has done some growth of her own, getting married and becoming a mom, and she’s imparting all that she learned on the way.

From beginning to end, this album feels like a therapy session, with her lyrics Trainor is holding the mirror to our fears, as well as being a wise voice on cloudy rainy days.

Don’t get me wrong. Like in life, this album is not just slow songs about self-reflection, but it’s an uplifting fun experience.

Like in the single “Made You Look,” where a loud and sexier Trainor sings “I could wear my Louis Vuitton, but even with nothin’ on, bet I made you look.” The music video is a family affair, featuring the singer’s best friend and TikToker Chris Olsen and former “Spy Kids” actor and her husband, Daryl Sabara.

Moreover, Trainor experiments through different music genres, like in the track “Mama Wanna Mambo.” Featuring Dominican singer Natti Natasha and Cuban-American musician Arturo Sandoval, it’s sure to raise your dancing fever.

In the 12th track “While You’re Young,” Trainor’s lyrics feel like that familiar voice in our head we always ignore, sometimes even involuntarily.

She tries to shake all the worries away and asks us to be more vulnerable. “You’ve only just begun and you’re good enough/And I know it doesn’t help with the pain, but have you ever tried to dance in the rain?/You’re not the only one who’s feelin’ this way.”

The album ends with the slow song “Final Breath,” which brings you back to the center of your emotions. Just like the best therapy session would do, right before sending you out into the real world.

Meghan sings “If I could, I’d do it all over again,” and as you end this fluctuation of genres and feelings, you feel less alone and reassured you are not going through all of this alone.

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Review: Meghan Trainor’s album is a therapy session for all

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Wrapping up a 50-plus year career with a farewell tour, the British pianist and vocalist has created some of the most memorable and enduring music in the history of pop-rock, songs burned into the collective DNA of humanity.

They may be quite simple, like the basic four-chord glory of “Crocodile Rock,” or dazzlingly complex like the 11-minute magnum opus “Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding.”

But now that it’s almost done, I hope you don’t mind that I put down in words how wonderful it has been to have Elton John on our radios and in our ears since the late 1960s.

The artist born 75 years ago as Reginald Kenneth Dwight kicked off the final leg of his North American farewell tour Friday night at Citizens Bank Park, home of baseball’s Philadelphia Phillies. And yes, he felt the love that night.

“America made me famous and I can’t thank this country enough,” he told the audience. “Thank you for the loyalty, the love, the kindness you showed me.”

He has sold over 300 million records worldwide, has played over 4,000 shows in 80 countries, and recorded one of the best-selling singles of all-time, his 1997 reworking of “Candle In The Wind” to eulogize Princess Diana, which sold 33 million copies.

Sir Elton (he was knighted in 1998) has scored over 70 top 40 hits, including nine No. 1s, and released seven No. 1 albums in the 3 1/2-year period from 1972 to 1975, a pace second only to that of the Beatles.

He has five Grammy awards, as well as a Tony award for “Aida.” His crooning of “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” in “The Lion King” motion picture has serenaded millions of children, and will entertain future generations of little ones.

The outrageous costumes and oversized glasses he was known for in his early ’70s heyday are gone now (he dressed as Donald Duck, Pac-Man, the Statue of Liberty, Minnie Mouse, and a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball player, among others). And while the man has not met a sequin or a feather he doesn’t adore, his wardrobe is (by Elton standards) somewhat tamer these days.

He took the stage in a white tuxedo with black lapels, and purple sparkly glasses, walking somewhat tentatively to his shiny black piano to pound out the instantly recognizable opening chord to “Bennie And The Jets.”

Next up was “Philadelphia Freedom,” which he dedicated to the hometown crowd as “one of the greatest cities I’ve ever played in.” It was his 52nd concert in the City of Brotherly Love.

Throughout the night, John rolled out a dazzling array of smash hits spanning musical styles and genres. The gospel phrasings and cadences that so influenced his early work were evident on “Border Song” and “Take Me To The Pilot,” and even the straightforward radio staple “Levon” got a come-to-meeting revved-up ending.

He showed off the prototypical power ballad, “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me,” with its close cousin “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.”

And when longtime guitar sidekick Davey Johnstone donned an inverted Flying-V guitar, it was time for the power chord arena rockers, including Elton’s hardest-rocking song ever, “Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting,” and the brash, boastful and Elton-to-the-bone anthem “The Bitch Is Back.”

Elton largely eschewed his famous falsetto; he still has 100 shows to go on the worldwide farewell tour that runs through next year, and he’s learned over the years how to conserve his voice without sacrificing his style and authenticity.

No matter: the crowd happily supplied the falsetto parts for him, including a mass sing-along of the “la-la-la” chorus on “Crocodile Rock.”

He reached back for only one deep track, “Have Mercy On The Criminal,” featuring Johnstone’s bluesy guitar licks, tucking it amid the dozens of smash hits.

And he avoided tear-jerkers like “Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word” and the gut-wrenching “The Last Song” about a farewell between a father and his son who’s dying of AIDS, in favor of an upbeat, celebratory mood.

“All The Girls Love Alice,” one of the earliest mainstream rock songs to focus on lesbian relationships in the early ’70s, is an enduring concert staple, as is the straight-from-the-heart “Your Song.”

Before the closing number, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” Elton peered toward the finish line of his final tour.

“I’m really looking forward to spending the rest of my life with my children and my husband,” he said. “Be kind to yourself. Love each other.”

The consummate showman to the very end, Elton finished the song, and was elevated into the sky on a hydraulic lift as a hole opened in a brick wall atop the stage, engulfed him, and closed again.

So while Elton John will soon be gone from the stage, thank God his music’s still alive.

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From the end of the world to your town, Elton John’s goodbye

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“I was curious what the process would be, because my process in English is very like me on a mic, and I just sing whatever kind of comes to my head, including lyrics. So I was like, ‘I wonder what’s gonna come out in Spanish,’” she said in a recent interview via Zoom from Los Angeles.

The first thing that came out was “Hasta Los Dientes” (Spanish for “to the teeth”), a pop tune featuring Argentine urban singer María Becerra about feeling jealousy for a boyfriend’s past. And then “Celia,” a rhythmic song that seems to reference Celia Cruz, the Queen of Salsa, in the chorus: “Ha vivido toa la vida sin azúcar / Conoció a Celia sin ir pa’ Cuba” (“He has lived his whole life without sugar / He met Celia without going to Cuba”).

With 12 songs in English, Spanish and Spanglish, including the singles “Don’t Go Yet” and “Bam Bam” with Ed Sheeran as well as collaborations with WILLOW (“psychofreak”) and Cuban singer Yotuel (“Lola”), Cabello released her third solo record under Epic Records on Friday.

“My heritage and roots are such a big part of who I am, and more and more something that makes me feel really connected and joyful and something I wanna get closer with as I get older,” she said referring to her parents and grandparents when asked about the title of the album, which in English means “family.”

But she also mentioned her close friends and collaborators, her “family by choice,” as she called them. “It’s like really about community and how important relationships are for me, and I think for all of us,” she said.

Musically, the pop album features classic rhythms like mariachi, mixing the old and the new in songs like “La Buena Vida” (“The Good Life”), which Cabello sings in English accompanied by Mariachi Garibaldi de Jaime Cuellar, with a Spanish chorus sang by the Mexican band and the singer’s father, Alejandro Cabello. She debuted it last October on an NPR Tiny Desk (Home) Concert celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, where she presented it as one of her favorites from her then-upcoming album.

“That was one of the songs I wrote with (producers) Ricky (Reed), Cheche Alara and Edgar Barrera. We were playing songs that I listened to when I was a kid: I played some Alejandro Fernández, we were listening to mariachi songs that my dad would play when I was younger. We were like, ‘What can we do that is like interesting and weird?’”

They tried combining a rhythmic pop song with mariachi and were excited with the result. “Yeah, they killed it on the production,” she said.

There’s also “Lola” with Yotuel — which she co-wrote with Mike Sabath and Scott Harris — about a woman that wants “patria y vida” (homeland and life) as opposed to “homeland or death,” Fidel Castro’s motto. The line comes from the Latin Grammy-winning song of 2021 “Patria y Vida,” by Yotuel, Descemer Bueno, El Funky, Gente de Zona, Yadam González, Beatriz Luengo and Maykel Osorbo. It became an anthem of the demonstrations in Cuba that year after some of its authors dared to express their disagreement with the government for the first time.

“I was so excited when Yotuel said yes to writing on that song (‘Lola’) and collaborating on it with me because, to me, “Patria y Vida” changed history and gave people a lot of bravery and hope that things could change in Cuba,” Cabello said.

To her, “Lola” represents not only the people from her native country but from any other nation with systemic oppression where “talented, smart people don’t get the same opportunities because of where they were born and where they live,” said the singer, who moved to Miami at the age of 6. “I was just reflecting about what my life would have been like if my family hadn’t come to the United States and all the possible kind of alternatives.”

As for “Bam Bam,” which many fans think is a song about Cabello’s break-up with Shawn Mendes, she said that “of course is something personal, every song (on the album) is whatever I was feeling that day (I wrote it).”

But with the catchy chorus “Así es la vida, sí / Yeah, that’s just life, baby,” how did it come to be?”

“Well, I feel like in Latin music there are so many songs that have these kinds of life lessons in them, … like the impermanence of things and of hard times and good times. I think love and relationships impermanence is a really common thing too; you just never know what’s around the corner, you never know what’s gonna happen, how things are gonna progress and change and transform,” Cabello said, adding that, when she hits a bad time or a good time, her mom always says “así es la vida (that’s life) … things catch you by surprise.”

After writing the song with her team based on that principle, she said they sent it to Ed Sheeran, who made some “amazing” changes and sent her the chord progression that we now hear.

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Camila Cabello finds joy in her roots for new studio album

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Since releasing “After Hours” in March 2020, The Weeknd has, like the rest of the world, lived through an isolating pandemic. His latest album, “Dawn FM,” carries listeners out of that darkness into a dance-worthy ’80s fantasy.

Left behind is the blood-slashed, manic super-villain singing about overindulgence and self-loathing we last saw in “After Hours” for a more mature and playful persona most interested in dancing off the pain of melancholia (and the pandemic) through the many dance-pop and escapist songs from the Toronto-born singer’s latest 16-track album.

“Dawn FM” is certainly the singer’s most creative project yet. The album plays like a radio station, featuring autobiographical storytelling from musical icon Quincy Jones and a DJ voiced by actor and comedian Jim Carrey. The album even includes advert breaks selling fictional afterlife products and a catchy radio jingle playing every few songs.

“You are now listening to 103.5 Dawn FM… you’ve been in the dark way too long,” Carrey’s voice quips in the first track. “It’s time to walk into the light.”

Collaborations sweep across the album, including features from Tyler, the Creator in “Here We Go…Again” featuring backup vocals by the Beach Boys’ Bruce Johnston; Calvin Harris and Lil Wayne in “I Heard You’re Married” and Swedish House Mafia in “How Do I Make You Love Me?” “Sacrifice” also contains a sample from Alicia Myer’s “I Want to Thank You,” another reference to the dance-pop-infused ’80s.

Thankfully, The Weeknd’s angelic voice and dark lyricism remain. The track order reflects the arc of a relationship. In “Gasoline,” the lovestruck Grammy-winner sings, “I love it when you watch me sleep.” By the album’s mid-point, he is deep in regret on “Out of Time” and love-scarred and hardened on “Don’t Break My Heart.” Despite the pain, the album’s maturity is expressed in the closing track, “Phantom Regret,” written by Carrey who says, “Heaven’s for those who let go of regret.”

The singer, who is known for making even the most content soul feel deep heartache, has produced an escapist fantasy that makes it hard to sit still. The chaotic combination of sorrowful lyrics, dance pop, and at times, birds tweeting above the sound of gushing waterfalls shouldn’t theoretically work, except that there are no such rules for our world as it now is.

Carrey’s parting words at the album’s end sum it up spiritually: “May peace be with you.”

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Review: The Weeknd curates an escapist fantasy in ‘Dawn FM’

The post The Weeknd curates an escapist fantasy in ‘Dawn FM’ appeared first on The Florida Daily Post.

Diana Ross’ first album in 15 years cuts through our present cynicism and slices past the despair. “Thank You” is a warm hug of music, less a tightly constructed pop vehicle, than a mood.

“It never rains forever,” Ross sings in one song. On another: “Turn it up/And give love a chance.” On a third she asks: “What if we could find a way/To laugh, love and pray?”

“Thank You” is a twinkling, blissful and bubbly wave of optimism, like being invited to a champagne party on a puffy cloud. Our hostess is full of goodwill, her voice warm and welcoming. There’s no velvet rope. All are welcome. “No matter what the question/I know the answer/The answer’s always love,” she sing.

The 13-track album finds Ross at the intersection of ’70s disco, ’80s electronica, ’90s house and the production savvy of the 2020s. There are two speeds — twinkling ballads and bootie-shakers.

But don’t get the wrong idea about the up-tempo ones. There’s nothing raunchy here. The song “Let’s Do It” isn’t about bedding anyone: “Let’s do it,” she sings. “Let’s make life better together.”

With “In Your Heart,” Ross urges us to “reach out and just touch somebody” – a nod to her 1970 hit “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand).” She revisits the opening lyrics of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” for “Beautiful Love.”

“Thank You” is Ross’ first collection of original songs since 1999’s “Every Day Is a New Day.” Cynics might dismiss it as overly sentimental, but is that a serious crime? She wants to say thank you, but we should be the ones thanking her.

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Diana Ross gives us a dose of hope on ‘Thank You’

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