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23 hours ago | 
newmusicoldmusic.substack.com | Will Hermes
Back in my more active clubbing days — those wacky fin de siécle years when Fatboy Slim (see below) was landing radio singles — there were few DJ acts I loved as much as Basement Jaxx. Their great jam “Romeo” followed a string of bangers, and it dropped in the summer of 2001, months before the World Trade Towers came down and everything in New York City, and the world it seemed, changed.
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5 days ago | 
newmusicoldmusic.substack.com | Will Hermes
I’ve been a bit slow on New Song of the Day posts lately, but I need to ramp back up. There’s no shortage of worthy tracks, as my latest new music playlist documents. Among those tracks was Fiona Apple’s hauntingly world-weary cover of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold.” She’s been slowly emerging from years of relative silence since her 2020 pandemic cri de cœur Fetch The Bolt Cutters.
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1 week ago | 
newmusicoldmusic.substack.com | Will Hermes
New music worth hearing. Old music worth remembering. Deep-dive playlists. Record reviews. Books. Concerts. New York City. Lou Reed. Genre-fluid.
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1 week ago | 
newmusicoldmusic.substack.com | Will Hermes
I just finished teaching a 7-week class on Lou Reed & Laurie Anderson at New York University last week. It was really great fun. And now I’m stoked to be able to offer my first-ever virtual writing class. Click here to register. My thanks to the good folks at Five Things I’ve Learned— they’re fans of my Substack and books who reached out and offered to host this class.
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1 week ago | 
newmusicoldmusic.substack.com | Will Hermes
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2 weeks ago | 
newmusicoldmusic.substack.com | Will Hermes
Welcome to New Music + Old Music. If you like the posts & playlist streams and want to get ‘em all, consider a subscription. Thanks - WillI first heard Mei Semones’ music about a year ago, when I was sent a link to her Kabutomushi EP. Heartfelt, earwormy indie-rock songcraft built on pirouetting guitar riffs clearly rooted in jazz and bossa nova, sung in English and Japanese, packaged in hand-drawn anime cover art, of a startled punk rock-ish character with big weird beetles in their hair.
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2 weeks ago | 
newmusicoldmusic.substack.com | Will Hermes
Welcome to New Music + Old Music. If you like the posts & playlist streams and want to get ‘em all, consider a subscription.
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3 weeks ago | 
newmusicoldmusic.substack.com | Will Hermes
Welcome to New Music + Old Music. If you like the posts & playlist streams and want to get ‘em all, consider a subscription. Thanks - WillNick Cave’s mid-tour in the U.S., and if you’re thinking, well, you’ve seen him, or aren’t the biggest fan — go anyway. My dude Harlan had a ticket for me to Thursday’s show at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, a sports arena that seats around 19,000 for concerts.
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4 weeks ago | 
newmusicoldmusic.substack.com | Will Hermes
Welcome to New Music + Old Music. If you like the posts & playlist streams and want to get ‘em all, consider a subscription. Thanks - WillBells Larsen photo by Lawrence FafardI was searching the internet for good new music recently, as I do, and found a song by an artist I’d remembered hearing and liking: Bells Larsen. The new song is titled “Blurring Time”, and it’s attached to a beautifully rough-hewn animated video.
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1 month ago | 
newmusicoldmusic.substack.com | Will Hermes
I’m currently teaching acourse at NYU on the artistry of Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, so I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how words can be combined with music — sung words, but also spoken words, and those that split the difference. The latter approach is sometimes tagged with the German terms sprechgesang or sprechstimme.