Each week, music journalists Courtney and Melissa sit down with a guest to discuss the one song they can never hear quite the same way again thanks to a past relationship. Big Joanie bass player Estella Adeyeri swings by Song My Ex Ruined to talk about how Mitski's 'Happy' was "almost" ruined by an ex but she refused to let it. Adeyeri says - "I just love the storyline that she sets in that song where it’s like, oh, like she didn’t hear them leave, and now’s, now I’ve got tidy up. It’s the come-down. It’s like, oh, this person’s here and stuff, and they made everything about them and not really considered my input, like my time. A few years later you’re like, 'Why was I so impressed about this man? Shouldn’t have been.'"

"The first thing you learn as a Palestinian is that you’re probably going to die. You have to engage a little bit extra because life could be over in 10 minutes” - DJ Sama' Abdulhadi says in a Guardian interview. Talking to Resident Advisor, she goes a step further: "We're human beings before anything else, and it's our trauma that creates our music and makes us who we are. It's just normal life for us, which is sad, because we're much more than that". She says her goal is to bring the world closer to Palestine—and Palestine closer to the world. Sama' Abdulhadi's short documentary, 'Portrait of Sama' Abdulhadi', will premiere online January 31st.

"Medieval Córdoba had more influence on global music than any other city in history. A thousand years before New Orleans spurred the rise of jazz, and instigated the Africanization of American music, a similar thing happened in Córdoba, Spain. You could even call that city the prototype for all the decisive musical trends of our modern times" - Ted Gioia proclaims in his latest post, about the culture hub which at the time had the largest population in the West - 450,000 inhabitants (much more than Paris, London, or Roma at the time). “This was the chapter in Europe’s culture when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived side by side,” asserts Yale professor María Rosa Menocal, “and, despite their intractable differences and enduring hostilities, nourished a complex culture of tolerance.” It is that intersection of cultures that made it so impactful - "It is our single best example of how the West can enter into fruitful cultural dialogue with the outsider—to the benefit of both... The Córdoba Model still has something to teach us today. If we flourished by living together a thousand years ago, why shouldn’t it happen again now? The role model we need isn’t hard to describe—the rules are tolerance, connectivity, interaction, sharing, a welcoming attitude to new peoples and influences".

The inclusion of 'Elvis' and 'Tár' amid this year’s big nominees fits a recent pattern, as the Oscars have taken more of an interest in music movies since 2018... Both focus on individuals with humble beginnings who concoct over-the-top personas, fall under the influence of powerful mentors, travel the world, wear impeccable suits, womanize, end up at the center of controversy, and bottom out in uncomfortable ways. Both feel like fever dreams, where the titular star is haunted by spirits and their own inner darkness. Both could easily be re-cut as horror films. Both are endlessly debatable. But only one of these films is good - Pitchfork looks into Oscar's Best Picture category and the two music-themed nominees.

Last year's The Rising Star winner at the Brits, singer-songwriter Griff, talks to Lyor Cohen, the Global Head of Music at YouTube. about women, creativity, songwriting, and new talent in The Face. "Female talent is still looked at as a product. So there’s so much more doubt that we could possibly be involved in the back-end of creative. And it’s frustrating. But that’s something that I’ve just tried to shut away" - Griff says. She adds "I’m trying to now be really intentional about protecting my work and not letting loads of people come in, just because the pressure is on and we need a hit song. Actually I am a producer and I am a songwriter, and the same talent that you signed, so I can still do this. So, yeah, it’s frustrating!".

"It’s mainly business, but it’s cool because you get to work with people who you may not have ever been in the room with if it was just being an artist... I can write records for people that I would never write for myself. I’ve been doing this for 31 years; there’s nothing I can’t do with a pen, but certain things would not make sense for my brand" - Skyzoo, rapper and ghostwriter, says in a Tidal interview. "When I make records with people, I’ve really morphed into who they are. I never want to be the ghostwriter that when you hear it, you can tell that I wrote it. I want you to really think that person wrote it and all of a sudden just went crazy [laughs]. The one thing I do when I ghostwrite, I try to sneak in at least one moment that’s my style, just for fun" - Skyzoo says, adding he's "made records with Maino, Lloyd Banks, Jill Scott, Raheem DeVaughn. I’ve worked with John Legend". When it comes to money, he says - "I get paid twice. I get work-for-hire pay, and then I get paid when the record gets placed. And I get my points and my publishing and all that stuff".

"At the lowest levels in a corporation, those analytical STEM skills help you get a promotion and a raise. But at the highest levels of management, your creativity, imagination, and core values are tested constantly. When you face the biggest decisions, there are so many trade-offs that no spreadsheet or algorithm can guide you—everything from worker motivation to community support can be at stake. You can’t even quantify those things, let alone calculate their trade-offs. You need something deeper. It’s more a matter of values and creative insight than math" - music writer Ted Gioia writes in favor of putting creative people to run big companies, even someone like Miles Davis. Gioia is inspired by changes happening recently at Barnes & Noble.

Oscar news! In the Best Original Song, the following are nominated. Rihanna was nominated for her 'Black Panther: Wakanda Forever' song “Lift Me Up,” Lady Gaga got a nomination for “Hold My Hand” in 'Top Gun: Maverick,' Sofia Carson is up for 'Applause' from 'Tell It Like a Woman', Son Lux’s song 'This Is a Life' featuring Mitski and David Byrne from 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' is also up for Oscar, as well as 'Naatu Naatu' from 'RRR' by Rahul Sipligunj, Kaala Bhairava, and M.M. Keeravani. In the Best Picture category, music-themed 'Elvis', and 'Tár' are nominated. Rolling Stone reports.

"NOIA and Buscabulla aren’t concerned with simply mirroring the architecture of a grief-stricken bolero; here, they reimagine it altogether. 'Eclipse de Amor' shines thanks to its unexpected production flourishes: Over the bolero percussion, an incandescent synth line from Buscabulla’s Luis Alfredo Del Valle flickers like a loose lightbulb, and in the outro, there is the whistle of Puerto Rico’s beloved coquí frogs" - Pitchfork emphasizes the latest track by the Barcelona-born, Brooklyn-based experimental pop artist NOIA.

Hipgnosis Songs Capital has announced that they have acquired Justin Bieber’s 100% interest in his Publishing Copyrights, Master Recordings and Neighboring Rights for Bieber’s entire back catalog, comprising over 290 titles released before December 31, 2021. The deal, worth $200 million, as reported by Billboard, is the largest rights sale for any artist of Bieber’s generation. It’s also Hipgnosis’ biggest acquisition to date.

Travel to, and transit through, Europe is difficult for Africans. The top three countries with the highest Schengen visa rejection rates are from the continent: Guinea-Bissau had 53% of its applications rejected, Senegal 52% and Nigeria 51% - Guardian looks into the problem of African musicians trying to play in Europe. To get a Schengen visa, a host of documents is required, and can include bank statements, return flights, addresses while abroad, travel insurance policies, and the threshold is getting higher and higher.

"YouTube paid out $6 billion to the music industry in a 12-month span and wants to surpass Spotify to become the industry’s largest revenue source. It started a $100 million fund to grow YouTube Shorts and take on TikTok" - Trapital's Dan Runcie looks into the YotuTube ambition and makes a few predictions.

Beyoncé headlined the private concert in Dubai to mark the opening of the luxury hotel Atlantis The Royal last weekend, which was her first full concert in more than four years, BBC reports. Beyoncé reportedly received $24m for her performance. She performed 19 songs, but the show did not contain any material from Beyoncé’s 2022 album 'Renaissance', which is purported to be a love letter to Black and queer dance music pioneers and communities. Homosexuality is illegal in the United Arab Emirates and considered a crime punishable by death.

A great new episode of How to Get Good at Music - Adam Neely and Elliott Klein discuss the legitimacy of writing your own solo. "Your ability to communicate an idea is based on your confidence in articulating it, and when you write stuff out ahead of time you fill a lot more confident... When you say things in your voice, you have to have your own way of saying things, and the way you develop that is by practicing and writing it out yourself" - Adam shares his advice. The two music experts also suggest you should sometimes fight to keep the imperfections in music.

Primary Wave Music has acquired the music rights of Robby Krieger and the late Ray Manzarek of the legendary US rock band, The Doors, Variety reports. Primary Wave says that the “monumental acquisition” includes Robby Krieger and the estate of Ray Manzarek’s interests in The Doors’ music publishing catalog, recordings, trademarks, and merchandise rights and income, among other things. Warner Music Group has struck what it calls a “milestone deal” with legendary British progressive rock band YES. The deal sees Warner acquire the recorded music rights and income streams from the band’s “complete” Atlantic Records era catalog (Variety).

Pitchfork has chosen 25 artists they’re "keeping a keen eye on this year... from twisted R&B auteur Liv.e to club rap regenerator Bandmanrill to indie rock realists Wednesday". Some are quite new in music like Akai Solo, and Grace Ives, a few have been around for a while but this year just might be the one for them, like Yasmin Williams, and Soul Glo.

Spotify has announced today (January 23) that it is in the process of reducing its employee base by “about 6% across the company”. At the end of Q3 2022, Spotify employed 9,808 full-time employees globally - six percent of 9,808 is 588, the MBW reports. In the last six months, music and tech companies have been hit with a series of layoffs. SoundCloud started reducing its global workforce by approximately 20%. BMI will lay off 10% of its workforce. Alphabet is letting 12.000 workers go, Microsoft 10,000, Amazon is cutting its workforce by 18,000...

Yis Kid is a London-based photographer with an interesting new project Faceless Techno - photos of clubbers shot from the shoulders down. “People who go to a techno party aren’t the type of people who want a portrait photo,” he explains.​“Usually, most people in the techno scene prefer to remain anonymous. It makes them feel more comfortable to fully express themselves in terms of aesthetics, and be more playful with their identity.” The Face talked to the artist.

Edward Avedisian played with the Boston Pops for 35 years and the Boston Ballet Orchestra for 43 seasons, performing with Aerosmith, Whitney Houston, Tony Bennett, Luciano Pavarotti, Leontyne Price, and Big Bird from Sesame Street over the years. He earned a modest salary, however, last year he has donated $100 million to he to Boston University. Unbeknownst to many, Avedisian found stunning success through his personal investments, turning the modest salary of a musician into a fortune. He was self-taught as an investor, reading books and Investor’s Business Daily, and regularly watching CNBC and Bloomberg for tips. Avedisian was a buy-and-hold investor, focusing on initial public offerings (IPOs) and taking a lot of risk by buying on margin. His secret was - “success is the intersection of opportunity and preparation”. Avedisian died late last year. Boston University Today has the story.

Vibrato is that natural oscillation of pitch that singers often use when singing sustained notes - music theorist Adam Neely points out in his latest video. He gives examples like Schubert's 'Ave Maria', and Duke Ellington's 'Caravan', and how much they lose without using vibrato. YouTuber/musician also offers some advice on the approach to music - "Take music very seriously, but maybe don't take yourself so seriously as you do it", and about a career in music - "You should be passionate about what you do and you shouldn't make any decisions out of fear".

American-Kameroonian singer-songwriter Libianca has released the visuals to her viral hit 'People (Check on Me)'. Libianca's emotional music video shows the singer struggling through isolation, loneliness, and depressive moods. At the video's conclusion, the singer shares a heartfelt message saying, "Check in on your people. What they may be dealing with internally could be much more than American-Kameroonian sing-songwriter meets the eye. Your sense of kindness can break the wall of isolation and the feeling that no one cares."

"Las Vegas wedding chapels recently received an unusual letter. It contained a cease-and-desist order—demanding that they stop using Elvis Presley impersonators to conduct marriages... I won’t get involved in the legal niceties here, but I seriously doubt any law firm is powerful enough to stop Elvis impersonation. Fake artists are as old as music itself" - Ted Gioia writes in his latest memo. Greece and Egypt are the earliest examples, with the blues being the fresher one. "You might even say that this practice is what made the blues a genuine tradition—artists preferred to take something pre-existing, and maybe change a few tiny details, rather than invent a new song from scratch. And we can’t really complain, because this is what allows oral traditions to last over the generations. Many of these blues songs would have disappeared if somebody hadn’t stolen them".

Singer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Art School Girlfriend has shared her new single 'A Place To Lie'. Clunk Magazine describes the song beautifully: "This whimsical and mysterious track feels like real soul searching piece, with a fast paced synth backing that feels as though Art School Girlfriend, aka Polly Mackey, is flicking through your mind and surfacig any stresses currently pressuring you. Her floating melodies, that have defined her previous work, flow graciously and guides the pace of the track throughout. The climax feels like the beginning of an epiphany, a complicated arrangement of electronics and strings that emerge from the background to the centre of the track, the coming together of every wandering thought, until finally at the end of the piece, everything resolves itself neatly".

Amazon Music is raising its standard individual Amazon Music Unlimited monthly subscription price from $9.99 to $10.99 in the US, and from £9.99 to £10.99 in the UK, Engadget reports. Amazon's Student Plan is going from $/£4.99 to $/£5.99 per month in each respective territory. Amazon is also increasing equivalent pricing in Germany and Japan. Apple Music announced late last year that it was upping its standard monthly subscription price from USD $9.99 to $10.99 in the US, and GBP £9.99 to £10.99 in the UK. Spotify for now refuses to do the same.

"Every digital streaming provider has a treasure trove of data on their deep catalogs and how their users interact with each song. This same data, along with their relentless A/B testing, has upped the effectiveness of personalized algorithms to keep users on the platform" - Trapital's Dan Runcie points out in his latest memo. He talked to Ari Herstand, an independent artist, course instructor, and author, who believes that algorithmic shift works in favor of independent artists who may not have the ear of the top playlist editors, but have a better chance to show up in one of your Spotify Mixes. It’s a numbers game, and numbers games benefit indies who are less reliant on gatekeepers.

It’s good to witness the current flourishing of what we might call Green Pop – though others may prefer Eco-Pop, Eco-Rock, etc... - challenging the current state of our environment - PopMatters writes proudly about the new wave of music dealing with climate change, and nature protection. PM presents American folk musicians that preceded them - Woody Guthrie, Neil Young, Chris Webby, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Malvina Reynolds, Tom Paxton, Pete Seeger, and Don Maclean.

"We will learn what happened on the record, but once it comes back into the live show, it really starts to change again, and it evolves because, in a live show, you’ve got to bridge all of the tracks. Things start to happen spontaneously in the show. Sometimes by accident, sometimes we allow things to happen. I think of that as decomposition, where you had the finished composition and now it’s starting almost to disintegrate” - the Comet is Coming drummer Max 'Betamax' Hallett says in the PopMatters interview. The band is deep in the tour part of the writing-editing-touring cycle, and they will be back to writing - “but to do that, we need to be ready, but we also need to be blank. The canvas needs to be white; there needs to be nothing there, so we’re ready to do something new".

"Truculent, technically gifted rapper who appears ambivalent about his chosen career... Spends most of these 90 minutes poring over his bad behaviour with much wit, if little humour... The chill, sparse productions foreground Clavish’s economical delivery beautifully, as he flirts with imploring vulnerability and vicious querulousness without ever committing to either" - Guardian's Damien Morris points out about Clavish's mixtape 'Rap Game Awful'. Alexis Petridis hears a voice of the generation - "his worldview is strikingly drawn and bleak, devoid of politicking, expressions of anger at societal injustice or indeed optimism: this is just what it’s like, he seems to say, and it’s unlikely to change. Life on the streets is an endless, numbing round of cheffings and nittys and opps getting splashed".

"Sure jazz is a big body of music, but it is full of wonders. If you’ve always wanted to get interested in jazz, just jump in. Don’t approach it with fear or a sense that you don’t know enough about it. It’s just a smorgasbord of stuff to enjoy. Or not. Take your pick from the variety" - PopMatters dares you to give jazz a chance. There are two lists - "the historical canon for those who want to be students [Coltrane, Holiday, Davis, Ellington...], but first I’m giving you a list designed to draw you in [Billy Cobham, Louis Jordan, Cassandra Wilson, Aaron Parks...]. No lessons here. No crusty things that don’t groove or only appeal to the brain. But, yes, it’s JAZZ, with the improvising and the daring but without the scary stuff".

Singer-songwriter-guitarist David Crosby, a founding member of two popular and influential ’60s rock units, the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, has died aged 81, The New York Times reports. Alexis Petridis points out that "Crosby genuinely was brilliant. He was blessed with a beautiful voice and an uncanny gift for harmony... a fantastic, forward-thinking songwriter". Rolling Stone picks out 20 essential songs by the folk-rock legend. The New Cue revisits an interview from a few years ago with the witty guy.