Nathan Zeller

I remember a time when a friend would visit weekly, and we’d gather around a laptop and sing songs. While our musical tastes were usually in synch, there would always be a tune or two that made one of us frown. Consequently, I ended up learning a lot about his musical tastes, as I’m sure he did of mine. One night, after singing “All My Loving” for the umpteenth time (this is when my Beatles obsession began), he queued a song from Weezer— a band I had never before heard of. I can’t recall the name of the song, but I politely smiled through it, readying my dismissal of the group.

The history of recorded music is as long as it is terrific. While that may sound wonderful, I can assure you there are strings attached.

Today’s mainstream artists face an originality problem, one which many musicians feel no desire to solve— though there are some current exceptions including Jacob Collier, Kendrick Lamar, and Vulfpeck. Few lack the passion required to create something that is truly their own, but among those who do is 22 year-old Canadian Shawn Mendes—one of five under-the-age-of-18 artists in Billboard album chart history to debut at #1. On Wonder, his latest album, Mendes chases that very passion.

To quarantine means to isolate for the safety of others. What it does not entail, is the ineptitude to collaborate, as shown by Tank and The Bangas with their newest EP, Friend Goals.

Forty years have come and gone since the release of the second entry within the self-produced McCartney series. One may wonder why a wait equivalent to a fourteenth century human lifespan was necessary. Or… one could let the feeling of gratitude wash over as at age seventy-eight, Paul McCartney continues to grace our lives with his music. Being my age, I lucked out in only living sixteen years in this world where the McCartney albums existed as a duology, or so I thought.