It's 2025. This will be the tenth year of my blog's existence, and in that time I've changed and grown a lot. If we're honest, I feel like I've done most of that changing and growing in just the past few years. In light of those changes, I feel like this blog hasn't been fully reflecting who I am as a person in real life. So, let's set that straight a little bit.
This blog launched with the tagline "The Real Rachel Claire", a statement designed to affirm my teenage self's shaky identity. In 2016, I had only just started using the name Rachel in my daily life, so I needed all the reinforcement I could get. I was crafting an identity for myself from the ground up and trying to figure out which parts of my personality were real and which were fake. I didn't know who I was or what I wanted from my life, and this blog was created to help me try to figure that out. In the years since then, I've outgrown that need.
For years, this blog was basically a placeholder that I only kept up in order to justify renewing the rachelhoots.com domain name. I used automated tools to keep it updating with each of my YouTube uploads. This year, though, I stopped making regular YouTube videos, and I felt like it was time to rethink and relaunch this blog. That started by rebooting my old album review series, and today, the final phase of that relaunch is complete: a new web address and a new title. Welcome to clairehoots.com!
One of the many changes in my life this year has been the realization that I want to go by my middle name, Claire, instead of my first name. I've spent the last six months or so gradually changing over to Claire, starting with my close friends and expanding from there to my work life, my social media accounts, and now my blog. Every time I start going by Claire in a new area of my life, it just feels natural. Going by Claire makes me feel like a whole new me, but it also feels like a recognition of how much I've grown. I'm not the person I was when I started this blog. I'm not trying to build a new identity from scratch- I'm just letting myself develop into someone I enjoy more every day.
So, if you're reading this, it's nice to re-meet you, and I hope 2025 is kind to us all.
Just like Hit Me Hard and Soft, I bought brat on CD based just on the album's reputation. I hadn't listened to even a single song, but I did know about brat's massive popularity and figured that it was an album I probably should listen to. And besides, I just had a really good experience with Hit Me Hard and Soft, which is probably my #1 album of the year. So, I picked up brat shortly after, and now, over a month later, it's finally time to write down my thoughts on this album.
There are some albums that I love from the first listen, and there are others that I only love after having listened to it constantly for weeks. brat is the latter type for me. I am a massive fan of this album and I love it, but I definitely did not love it on first listen. I had just listened to Hit Me Hard and Soft, which is a completely different kind of album, and brat is not an album that benefits from a comparison with Hit Me Hard and Soft. Over time, however, I learned to look at brat on its own terms, and that is when I started to love it.
Something I believe about music is that if something is popular, there's probably a reason why, and if I don't like something that's popular, it's probably because I'm looking at it from the wrong perspective. All music has something valuable about it, and if you think that pop music sucks, chances are it's an issue with your perception of the music and not the music itself. So, in order to get the most out of brat, I had to figure out what standards to judge it by. I needed to figure out what the album was trying to be, and form my opinions in light of that.
So, what is brat? On the surface, it's nothing but club music. It's heavy four-on-the-floor beats, abrasive and repetitive synths, and the lyrics aren't all that deep- at least, that's the surface level reading of the album. If you're looking for fun music that isn't that deep and isn't particularly innovative or unorthodox, you'll find plenty of that on this album. And if you only listen to brat once or twice, that may be all you hear. Over time, though, you'll start to see that there's more below the surface.
I've noticed a phenomenon with music that I don't like on the first listen- those songs that make me vaguely uncomfortable the first few times I hear them often end up being some of my favorites later on. That happened with "360", "Girl, so confusing", and "Everything is Romantic" off of this album. At first, I was put off by those songs not making much sense to me, and I didn't really like the surface level readings of those songs. But over time, as I started to sink my teeth into those songs, I started to understand what was going on and I started to like them after all- and that basically sums up my experience of the whole album. The surface level reading is boring, offputting, and sometimes irritating.But once I got past that, I started to love the album.
For a more specific example, I'd like to bring up "Girl, so confusing". I really didn't like that song at first. I was hearing it as a pretty vapid account of what womanhood feels like. I wrote it off as just another "being a woman sucks" song, which isn't particularly interesting and isn't a message I really want to hear because despite the challenges, I actually really love being a woman. I couldn't imagine myself any other way, so I'm going to mentally resist any time I hear information that contradicts that. However, as I listened to brat more, I started to pick up on what "Girl, so confusing" was actually trying to say. It's about the contradictions in womanhood, the uncertainty around how others see you, and the difficulty of understanding your place in a world that is simultaneously obsessed with you and indifferent to you. Those are all feelings I know well and can deeply relate to. And if I had only listened to the song once or twice, I would have missed it.
One big feature of the album that I did understand from the first listen was the importance of the sound design. brat is pretty much all synths and drum machines, with the occasional acoustic instrument- most notably the incredible piano part in "Mean Girls", which is one of my favorite moments on the album. But overall, the dominant soundscape is synths that could have come out of the 90s, and that's not a bad thing. Charli XCX's vocals are, as usual, pretty heavily autotuned to the point of being an aesthetic choice. For the record, I love that aesthetic, but it's also worth mentioning that the moments on brat where the autotune drops out are also some of the best moments on the album. I initially criticized Charli XCX for not being vulnerable enough on brat, but as with most of my initial criticism of this album, it didn't hold up after multiple listens.
On my first listen of brat, I told a friend that I wouldn't rate it more than a six out of ten. I said the first half was uninspiring, and the album would only be good as background music because I probably wouldn't want to actively listen to it. All of those things were wrong. Today, I would put brat in my top five best albums of the year and I've been listening to it constantly since I bought the CD. I prefer the first half over the second half, but I love the whole thing. And I put it on when I want to listen to good music, not just as background music I don't care about. In fact, I've probably listened to brat more than I've listened to Hit Me Hard and Soft recently, and that's my album of the year. I find brat to be fun and accessible, and also plenty deep enough to listen to as "serious" active listening. I'm gonna give brat a 10/10 as an apology for my harsh words at first, and my favorite song off the album is "B2b".
Every once in a while, I come across an album that I love deeply from the very first listen. HIT ME HARD AND SOFT by Billie Eilish is one of those albums. Unless the greatest album ever recorded comes out in the next two and a half months, I think this is going to be my album of the year for 2024. I may be five months late to the party, but I really just want to talk about how great this album is.
HIT ME HARD AND SOFT came across my radar for the first time when it was the topic of discussion for an episode of Ghost Notes, which is one of my favorite podcasts. I listened to the episode, in which the hosts heaped praise on HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, and I made a mental note to check the album out at some point, but I didn't really think about it much after that. I did, however, remember that The Diner was singled out by the Ghost Notes crew as a particularly good song.
A few months later, I bought the album on a whim while on my lunch break. I had felt like doing a little bit of shopping, so I went somewhere I knew I was likely to find a couple of CDs, and I found HIT ME HARD AND SOFT. It was either that or Taylor Swift, so I picked up the Billie Eilish album and thought about that episode of Ghost Notes. I was working late that night, so I set the CD aside to listen to the next day. When I did, I was absolutely blown away.
The opening track, Skinny, immediately caught my attention. As a guitar player, I love to hear electric guitar start off an album. And then Billie's singing came in, and I knew right away that I was listening to something good. The chamber strings outro (which I didn't know yet was a call forward to The Greatest) rounds out an amazing opening track, and then I listened to Lunch for the first time.
Okay, not exactly the first time. I heard Lunch for the first time in my friend's car on the way to a soccer game, but it wasn't all that loud and we were talking over it anyways. But I did notice that it was cool, and I'm pretty sure I mentioned something about needing to check the album out, which Soleil agreed with and then we moved on to other matters (like the fact that she'd driven us to completely the wrong place!). But let me just say, Lunch is a completely different experience when you listen to it with headphones on, completely focused on the song. I knew Billie Eilish had come out as bisexual recently, and I knew that she was into girls, but I was not exactly ready for the second song on the album to be such a direct tribute to sapphic sexuality. Needless to say, I love the song and can't get enough of it.
I could go on like this, praising every song on the album, but I'll limit myself to just two more. First, The Greatest has been an earworm for me since my second or third listen. I love when songs start small and intimate before exploding into a loud and intense experience. Knowing that, if you're familiar with the album it shouldn't surprise you that my favorite song is L'Amour De Ma Vie for that same reason. Neither The Greatest nor L'Amour De Ma Vie would benefit from me trying to explain them here, so just go listen to them if you haven't yet. They're dynamic, expressive, and break out of the typical pop mold brilliantly.
And that's what I really love about this album as a whole. It's deeply expressive emotionally, and part of what makes that expressiveness compelling is the way songs follow an emotional arc rather than a typical song form consisting of a verse and chorus that each repeat, a bridge, and a final chorus. That basic structure exists here, but Billie Eilish stretches and distorts those forms so that the songs don't feel disorienting, but they do feel unpredictable when you're listening for the first time. Once you're familiar with the music and know what's coming next, it's very satisfying to see the twists coming ahead of time. Eilish has always been masterful at crafting outros, and HIT ME HARD AND SOFT takes that to an entirely new level. It can sometimes be hard to tell when one song ends and another begins, and it's not always obvious whether you're listening to the outro of one song or the intro of the next. The flow of the album is so well thought out that I'm going to repeat my frequent refrain on this blog: the best albums are the ones that are experienced best as one cohesive work rather than just a collection of songs, and HIT ME HARD AND SOFT is one of those albums.
Before I wrap things up, I do want to comment on the sonic palette of the album. It's a pretty guitar heavy album by 2024 standards, which I appreciate. HIT ME HARD AND SOFT is a very human feeling album with plenty of personality. Even the synth parts, which are frequently the target of accusations of music sounding "impersonal" are imbued with a human touch. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that most of the sound design sounds like it could have come out of the late 1990s. When the synths are in the foreground, they're usually brash sawtooths with beautifully obnoxious filters that sounded dated on my first listen, but on further reflection I think they sound like a tribute to the over-the-top production styles of the past. It may stand out like a sore thumb today, but it's an aesthetic choice that, while jarring to me, still works to support the overall work. You wouldn't expect those synths on such a chill album, but it works.
Obviously, I'm giving HIT ME HARD AND SOFT ten stars out of ten, there's no other way to rate this album. It's been in constant rotation in the car, at home, and anywhere else I happen to be listening to music. I'm so thankful that I found this CD on that lunch break, and I'm also very happy I got to share the experience of discovering this album with Soleil, who has also become an enthusiastic fan after I shared my experiences listening to the album for the first time over text. My favorite song now, as it was on my first listen, is L'Amour De Ma Vie. The video recording below omits the extended outro, but it's still such a great recording that I've got to share it.
Six years ago, I wrote a blog post titled "Why I Still Buy CDs in 2018". At that time, it was beginning to feel like the Compact Disc was dying in popular culture, and that internet streaming was beginning to take over the music industry. And of course, that's exactly what happened. For most people, music is no longer something you buy, it's something you pay for a subscription to access over the internet. As this shift has happened, though, my belief in the superiority of the CD has strengthened. So today, I'd like to explain why I think the compact disc shouldn't be allowed to die, and why I think it is actually the best way to listen to albums in 2024.
Let's get a few things straight first. I'm not trying to say that CDs are perfect for every music listening need you might have, or that it's better than streaming for everyone. What I am saying is that the CD is a format that is much more convenient, useful, and practical for modern life than it gets credit for, and that you should consider listening to music on CDs if your listening habits align with the strengths of the format in today's music landscape. As evidenced by the growing size of my CD collection, I believe CDs make sense for me. They might make sense for you, too.
In my original blog post, I asserted that CDs were not as convenient as streaming, but I liked them anyways so I kept buying them. Six years later, I've changed my opinion. Buying CDs is more convenient than streaming for the kind of listener I am. I like listening to albums, in order, all the way through. I think that an album can be more than the sum of its parts, as I've already written numerous times on this blog. So let's compare what it takes to listen to an album in 2024 on streaming versus compact disc. Streaming is the most popular method, which requires a subscription or putting up with ads. Then, you have to find the album you want to listen to- that shouldn't be so hard, but often requires navigating through menus and swiping past distractions. Then, you need to hook your phone up to something to play the music out of, or else resign yourself to crappy phone speakers. Bluetooth is frequently unreliable for me and annoying to deal with, but to avoid it you'll need a dongle, which costs more money and in my experience reduces the audio quality considerably by adding hum that wasn't there before. Oh, and if you lose your internet connection, your music is interrupted. That's method one. Alternatively, you could take a CD, place it in a CD player, and just hit play.
Let's quickly run through some of the advantages of CDs as compared to streaming. CDs have no ads. You can buy a CD once and it's yours forever. You can buy them used for next to nothing- that's how I built my collection. You can rip those CDs to your computer and then put them on your phone or any other device you want- they'll be available whether you have an internet connection or not. If your computer doesn't have a CD drive, they can be bought pretty cheap as well, not to mention how cheap CD players are at thrift shops. I got my 5 CD changer for $15 and it is amazing. CDs have better audio quality than streaming, with no internet connection required. CDs typically also come with a booklet, which is totally worth a flip through if you're a big fan of the artist. And finally, when Spotify or Apple Music or whatever finally shuts down, you won't lose all your music if you have it on CD.
I want to dwell on that last point a little while. Right now, we're in a bit of an enshittification crisis. Online services in particular are rapidly getting worse as big companies compete to cut costs, to the detriment of their product. Online music streaming services are no different. User interfaces are getting clunkier and more cluttered. Features that used to be free are going behind paywalls, and features that used to be available with a subscription are being removed entirely. And after all that, you don't even own your music library on one of these services. Every online service eventually ends, and when Spotify ends, I'm going to lose all 200+ of my playlists unless I save them elsewhere beforehand. This will happen to every user of every streaming service eventually, and if you don't like it, you need to change your listening habits.
I still have CDs that I've had since I was a child. I have CDs that I've bought used that are twice as old as me, and they work just the same as they always have. And of course, I have new releases from this year. CDs predate Spotify, and while Spotify's quality is diminishing at the moment, CDs work just as well as they always have. When I bring up that I listen to CDs to friends, they'll often mention that they don't have a CD player anymore. To that I just want to say that it's a solvable problem. You can just go buy one, they aren't expensive. In the long run, streaming is much more expensive.
Of course, there are things streaming does that CDs can't really compete with. The modern understanding of playlists is a totally internet-reliant phenomenon, for example. You can make CD mixtapes, but nothing is quite the same as a 10+ hour playlist. CDs also don't allow you to discover new music as easily as you can on streaming services. In years past, when I wanted to find new music I'd put on Spotify's For You and Release Radar playlists and add anything that I enjoyed to my liked songs. Discovering new music through CDs requires an element of risk typically. However, I've never really discovered new music through CDs. I've almost always listened to albums on the internet before buying a CD, and that's still true. But when I find an album on streaming services that I like, I will almost always try to buy it if I really like it, assuming CDs for that album are even being made.
Over the last six years, I've come to the conclusion that CDs are valuable and are worth building listening habits around. Today, I listen to CDs in the car when I'm driving, at my desk using my CD player, and I rip every CD I buy so that I have it on my phone in case I ever want to deal with the hassle of plugging in or connecting bluetooth in exchange for the ability to listen to a CD I left at home but wanted to listen to anyways. I use Spotify when I want to listen to music in playlists, or albums I don't own but might want to someday, or listen to music recommendations from friends, or when I'm listening to music on a device that doesn't have access to my own music library. Both can coexist, but I find myself gravitating towards good old, physical CDs. As the internet gets worse, CDs stay the same. In 2018, I said CDs were less convenient but I liked them anyways. Today, I think that CDs are back to being more convenient. There just isn't anything easier than placing a disc in a CD player and hitting play.
I'm a big fan of live albums. As a performer myself, I love listening to a great performance that has been immortalized on tape. Of course, I know intellectually that a live album is not the same as going to a concert. There's a lot of mistakes that can be corrected after the fact in a recording, and Where the Light Is is no different. But there's still a special kind of magic that you get on a live album that you don't get from a studio album. And for an artist like John Mayer, that extra magic is where some of his best musicianship is. Where the Light Isis an incredibly well polished live album that is missing none of the live feel that I want from a good live recording.
Every genre of music has different expectations for what a live album should be. In jazz, for instance, it's almost taken for granted that a jazz album is recorded live, even if it's live from a studio. The ethos of jazz includes the expectation that jazz should be recorded with all the musicians in the same room, playing all at once, and that room should ideally be a jazz club with an audience. Even if it's not recorded in that setting, jazz albums are still expected to sound like they could have been recorded like that. Even in jazz studio albums, there is an expectation that there will be a live feel. On the other side of the spectrum, pop live albums have no such genre-wide mandates. A live album by a pop artist might include extensive post production editing including overdubs, autotune, and the concert the album was recorded at could have been entirely pre-recorded anyways. It's entirely possible to imagine a live album from a modern pop artist where no musicians were playing live, and the vocalist's performance was so heavily edited it couldn't qualify as live anymore either. And that's not to say that doesn't happen in other genres, but pop music doesn't try to hide it like jazz does.
John Mayer's live albums, and this one in particular, tend much closer to the jazz side of this spectrum than the pop side, at least when it comes to the live feel. Listening to Where the Light Is, you can't deny that it feels live. The album was recorded in a theater, and it sounds like it. I wasn't at the venue when it was recorded, but I find it hard to imagine much was lost in translation. Well, except for the two cut songs. There is that to be aware of. Because despite the audible crowd interaction and the perfectly imperfect live vocals, this album is still heavily polished- but not too heavily polished. The vocals sound like they were recorded on a typical live vocal mic, not a studio microphone, and you can hear that Mayer's distance to the microphone isn't consistent. The mixing engineers probably worked hard to get it to sound as good as it does, but it still sounds like a guy singing into an SM58 at a concert- a sound I'm well acquainted with, and a sound that sells the live feel to me in a subtle but powerful way.
Okay I'm three paragraphs in, I should probably start talking about the music. Where the Light Is comes in the form of a 2-CD double album, where the first disc is split between an acoustic set and the John Mayer Trio. The second disc is full rock band. Each of these sets has a mix of memorable John Mayer hits, deeper cuts, and a cover or two. The acoustic set tends towards older material, the trio set obviously draws heavily on the John Mayer Trio's album Try!, and the band set focuses on mostly material from John Mayer's latest album at the time, Continuum. I love the track listing here. There's a little bit of everything, and every John Mayer song is developed just a little bit more than it was when it was first released. There are extended solos, altered lyrics, brand new intros and outros, and all the other little things that make me love listening to live recordings. As a John Mayer fan, these are songs that I know, played in a new way.
John Mayer's blues and rock roots are even more evident on his live albums than they are on his more pop-friendly studio releases. At the same time, I'm impressed at how well his songs translate over to a live context. The arrangements are largely the same as the original songs (with the exception of the acoustic set), but the band feels looser, like they're playing together and playing off each other more. It's not as sanitized as the studio albums are. It's not even like the studio albums are that sanitized or sterile, but there's just that extra 10% edge on the sound when it's done live. You can hear the chemistry between band members and if that doesn't make a live album worth listening to, I don't know what does.
As with Unreal Unearth, the last album I reviewed, Where the Light Is is an album that benefits from a full listen through rather than just picking out individual songs. Unreal Unearth is greater than the sum of its parts because it is a concept album, but Where the Light Is is stronger than any individual song because live albums are all about mentally putting yourself in the room where it happened. It's about imagining that it's December 2007 and you're in Los Angeles and you don't know what's going to happen next. Even if you do know, you have to pretend you don't.
I found this album at a record store in a trendy side of town that I didn't know existed until I walked past it one day. I stopped in, and found this album. I listened to it on the drive home, and it quickly became one of my favorite live albums. I listened to the band set while driving, with the stereo turned up as loud as I could stand, and listened to disc one at home through my my nice headphones to get all of the nuance of the more intimate sets. Since then, I've listened to the whole thing straight through, I've listened to just disc two with the band set, and I've had it in my shuffle rotation when I want to listen to John Mayer and I don't really care what songs come on. In all those contexts, this album makes me instantly happy as soon as it starts, because I know that it will suck me in quickly.
As I'm writing this, the last song of the album, "I'm Gonna Find Another You", just came on, and I know my time listening is almost up. Normally when I write these reviews, I listen to the album on repeat while I write, proofread, and re-write. While this album is plenty long (two hours and four minutes!), I know I can't let it repeat back to the beginning. My listening ends here, because the show is over. Maybe I'll edit this review while listening to a different John Mayer live album I have. But that's just the power of the live album- it draws you in, and asks you to play by its rules. Who am I to say no?
My favorite song from Where the Light Is is "I Don't Need No Doctor", a Ray Charles cover that caught my ear because it's one of the few songs I didn't already know when I first listened to this album. I love a good blues, and I love that it's the only song with presumably improvised solos for both the trumpet player and the saxophone player. As a jazz saxophonist myself, I really enjoyed that. I have no choice but to rate this album five stars.
If I have an Album of the Year for 2023, it's Unreal Unearth by Hozier. Unreal Unearth is one of those albums that I wasn't really sure about the first time I listened to it, but I did know right from the beginning of the first track that there was some really good music in there. Over subsequent listens, I found myself connecting with the album on a level that I don't feel very often.
The album opens with De Selby pt. 1 and De Selby pt. 2, which work together to set the tone for the album. The soundscape feels intensely intimate, especially in part one. It's hard to get any more intimate than a singer and a single acoustic guitar, but that intimacy is maintained throughout the album even as the arrangement grows in scope. De Selby pt. 2, while much louder and bolder, maintains that very personal feeling even with a completely different context for it. This continues throughout the album- Hozier's lead vocals are always soloistic, virtuosic, and incredibly emotionally potent whether he's singing softly over one or two instruments or singing over a full rock band mix. De Selby parts 1 and 2 show off both styles, and the rest of the album builds on those initial tracks.
Personally, I have some history with Hozier. In high school, I was unwillingly subjected to his 2013 single "Take Me to Church" with distressing frequency, as is the custom of top 40 radio. I didn't have the context of the album it came from (now a favorite of mine as well). I also probably wasn't really ready to appreciate the song's lyrical content. I just knew that it was another overplayed pop song that didn't have a place in my rotation of Taylor Swift, Owl City, and Slash ft. Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators albums. My friends at the time, in particular my longtime collaborator and dear friend Denaie, tried to get me to see the light, but I wasn't ready, so I let Hozier pass me by in high school, confident that I wasn't missing much.
But of course, times have changed. Owl City's music since The Midsummer Station has been hit or miss for me. I can't even listen to Taylor Swift anymore because I'm too annoyed by her as a person. And Hozier has wound up at the top of my rotation as one of my favorite artists and in the year 2024 I own all of his albums on CD. How did that happen?
Well, another one of my friends finished the work Denaie started. I'd like to thank Soleil (who made a Hozier cover with me!) for convincing me to listen to Unreal Unearth, which I did with initially low expectations. I've listened to other albums on their suggestion, with mixed results. I'm pretty picky when it comes to music so that's no insult to Sol's taste. But at any rate, I put Unreal Unearth on one night before bed, and gave it a listen. I didn't really get it, but I could tell that it was good stuff, the kind of good stuff that I wouldn't be able to fully identify on the first listen. There's this incredibly pretentious academic term called "high information music", which is basically the idea that some music is just better because it has more music happening in it than other music. I don't like that as a concept because it seems more likely to be used to belittle music that academics don't like rather than elevate music that your average music listener does, but I'm going to commandeer the term for that purpose here. Unreal Unearth is high information music that has a lot going on and it wasn't easy for me to tease out all that nuance and value the first time around, but I could identify that it was there. That's why I gave it a second listen, and a third, and a fourth... and the next thing you know I'm going to a Hozier concert and buying his CDs and putting them on every time I get in the car.
Unreal Unearth has some incredible individual songs, such as De Selby pt. 2, First Time, Francesca, Eat Your Young, Damage Gets Done, and First Light. But my favorite part of the album isn't any individual song or group of songs. It's the overall experience of listening to the album, from start to finish, where you can feel yourself being taken on a journey beginning with the descent into hell and ending with the emergence back into the light at the end. Unreal Unearth is a masterpiece in album sequencing, pacing, and storytelling without explicitly saying anything about the story. I'm a big fan of listening to albums from start to finish, and this is an amazing album for that purpose. There are songs on this album that are not satisfying at all when listened to out of context, but feel like important moments of arrival when encountered in the course of a full album listen- one example being Son of Nyx.
The climax of the album, and one of the best songs, is the song First Light. It represents the conclusion of the journey; the return to where it started. The entire album comes to a head here, and to describe it in too much detail would only do it a disservice, so I'll keep it short and just say that this song, when heard at the end of the album after an hour of music, is incredible. It's one of the best album closers I've ever heard, a fitting compliment to the De Selbys, which together are one of the best album openers I've ever heard. It's a satisfying conclusion to an amazing arc that you would never experience if you only ever listened to #1 hits. Maybe high school me was right all along: one Hozier song out of context isn't all that great. But now that I've heard the album and understood the context, all of the individual songs are elevated. That's true of the singles from Unreal Unearth, and it's doubly true for Hozier's debut album that I panned all those years ago- perhaps that will be the subject for a future album review.
Before concluding, I need to take a moment to talk about the textures and instrumentation of Unreal Unearth. The sustained intimacy of this album despite its dynamic highs and lows is only possible because of the instrumentation. Unreal Unearth employs a dark sound comprised of very human instruments- acoustic pianos and guitars, a string section, and choirs all give the album a distinctly human touch. When things get more intense, we hear a rhythm section consisting of a bass guitar dripping with personality, tight drumming on a funk-sounding kit that I can't get enough of, electric piano and simple synth patches that mostly stay out of the way of the arrangement, and electric guitar sounds that could have come out of the 70s- and I love it. Hozier's use of fuzz and overdrives in a way that don't overpower the sound aren't exactly revolutionary, but they are refreshing. As a guitarist myself, I love the rich layers of acoustic and electric guitars that create the spacier sounds on this album, and I love the tight rhythm playing that locks in with the rest of the rhythm section so well. In particular, the guitars on Anything But are layered so densely and yet the overall sound is so light and airy. Whatever the intensity level of the music is, it's being played in a way that makes it apparent that real people are the ones doing it, and I love it.
All this talk and I've barely even mentioned the lyrical themes of the album, but that's not exactly what I listen to Unreal Unearth for. The lyrics are genius of course, and I appreciate them, but I'm here for the music. I'm here for the soundscapes. I'm here for the grooves, and I'm here for the stellar vocal performance that reminds me the voice is an instrument too, and it can be infinitely nuanced and expressive. What he's saying with that voice is profound and deeply interesting, but it's not what I'm primarily here for.
Unreal Unearth was easily my favorite album of 2023, beating out competition from Metallica's 72 Seasons and Olivia Rodrigo's GUTS, both of which I've enjoyed thoroughly since they came out. It's hard to pick a favorite song from Unreal Unearth, but if I had to pick, I'd go with the first song that I really loved from this album- my favorite track is De Selby pt. 2.
This is the first song I've finished since my album, and it's a really exciting one. It's always exciting for me to collaborate with someone else, and that goes double when it's one of my best friends. Hopefully this will be the first of many to come.
For this song, I played the electric guitar parts on my Fender Telecaster Deluxe using a tube screamer, the acoustic part on my Hohner dreadnought. The sax writing was AATT, which is becoming my new standard practice now that I have a tenor sax.
Autumn is the oldest track on Radio Rachel, and the only song on the album that predates my YouTube channel. I thought it was time to upload it to YouTube. I still think the original version has a lot of charm.
In my announcement post, I explained why I chose to make an album this year. Since then, I've finished mixing and mastering, finalized the album title and art, and the album has been released! This isn't the first time I've made an album, but I've never done it quite like this so I wanted to take some time to write down my thoughts about what I've learned from the process, what went well, and what I'm going to do differently next time.
Almost none of the songs on Radio Rachel were written to be on an album together. "Tele Gang" and "Interlude" are the two exceptions, but the vision for the album was to bring together my best preexisting songs and make an album out of them. Two songs were written for past albums, but the remaining eight were all written as standalone songs for my YouTube channel. They weren't written with a coherent creative vision, which seems unhelpful at first, but it actually helped develop Radio Rachel's greatest strength- variety.
The most intimate song on the album has a very sparse texture. "Optimism: Take Two" has one guitar, bass, drumset, and one saxophone for the majority of its runtime. In contrast, "Tele Gang" boasts three lead guitar parts, two rhythm guitars, synths playing chords, bass, drums, and a full saxophone section consisting of two altos and two tenors. All of these instruments are playing at once. The range of this album, just in terms of texture, is staggering. And yet, the core instrumentation of guitars + saxophones stays pretty consistent throughout, so there's a line of continuity despite the dramatic changes in ensemble size.
Stylistically, this album is also very diverse. I've pulled from all my influences, including jazz, rock, pop, metal, hip hop, and even classical composition techniques. The fact that these songs were all written at different times in my musical journey also adds to the diversity. I know I couldn't have written "The Katocaster" five years ago, but I also haven't written anything like "Autumn" in the ten years since I wrote that song. The contrast between my 2010s and 2020s compositions only make the album stronger.
The recording process went exceptionally well for Radio Rachel. I made a spreadsheet with a row for every track and a column for every instrument, and for the most part I picked up each instrument and played through the entire album in about a day, give or take. Rhythm guitar took the longest, because there are usually multiple rhythm guitar parts for each song, somewhere between one and five but typically three or so. Woodwinds, on the other hand, took almost no time to record everything. Every song has at least one alto sax part and at least one tenor sax part, and many have a second part for each.
My process for recording each instrument was more or less the same: I pulled up the sheet music on one half of my screen, Reaper on the other half, and played the album down from start to finish. Sometimes I'd record songs out of order for variety. I started out with MIDI stems for every track in the album, and each time I recorded an instrument I found that MIDI track and deleted it. That way, I was hearing the entire arrangement while recording each part, with the parts I hadn't yet recorded being represented by the midi imitations. After each placeholder had been replaced, I was ready to mix.
My recording order was bass first, then clean rhythm guitars, distorted rhythm guitars, lead guitars, and then woodwinds. Throughout that entire process I would take breaks to work on the programmed drums and synth parts. I didn't actually play any keyboards on this album, it's all sequenced MIDI running through VSTs. But keyboards aren't the focus of this album, so I didn't think it was worth the time and effort to learn and play every keys part when I already had the MIDI ready to import directly from the score. It's not like anyone would listen to a Rachel Hoots album to hear keys, after all.
Mixing and mastering the album took quite a while, and I still feel like it wasn't completely perfect. I learned a few new tricks, and made use of pretty much every mixing technique I know. It was very difficult to get such a diverse selection of songs sounding coherent together, but I think I did an alright job. I made extensive use of busses in the mixing process- I grouped my tracks into lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass, drums, keys, and woodwinds. Once I got all of the parts within each section relatively balanced to each other, I focused on finding the right balance between the larger sections. I still feel like I could have done a better job, but I had to finish at some point, so I called it done when I got sick of listening to it.
The mastering chain was pretty simple. I used a compressor, a saturator, and a limiter- all stock plugins in reaper. I aimed for about -9 LUFS but let's be honest, every streaming service these days normalizes the volume of every song so I'd imagine this isn't as big of a deal as it used to be. But of course, because I've got some very sparse jazz and some very dense metal both on the same album (and sometimes on the same track!) I let the LUFS vary from song to song so that hopefully the big songs would sound bigger and the soft songs would sound softer.
All in all, I'm very proud of this album project. However, there are things I would do differently. I think I could have done a better job mixing, and I think it would be nice for my next album to have a coherent creative vision from the start instead of trying to organize pre-existing songs into a tracklist. It's easy for me to think about all the things I could have done on Radio Rachel, but I need to keep reminding myself that Radio Rachel wasn't meant to show off everything I am capable of- it's just a little showcase of some of my best work, and I'm very much operating in my musical comfort zone. That's okay. Maybe next time I'll push myself a bit more. Next time, I'd like to make the fast songs faster and more technical, the slow songs slower and more expressive, and the middle tempos more rock solid. But that's for next time.
In the week since the album came out, I've been very happy with the positive reception that Radio Rachel has had. I think I met my goal of creating an album I can be proud of, and it makes me very happy to see people enjoying it.
.png)
