Adele, P!nk and Rihanna top the music fan’s wishlist for big pop albums this year
Songwriters got busy when touring stopped and music fans are the winners as the new release schedule of singles and albums ramps up.
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When COVID-19 killed live music, those solitary songwriter souls got busy.
Those who didn’t have home studios, fashioned them in spare corners of bedrooms and channelled the boredom and anguish of lockdown isolation into creating new works.
They wrote alone, collaborated across borders via video, traded pieces of lyrics and melodies via email, uploaded and downloaded trillions of digital files.
And now they are translating to dozens of singles and albums, a potential golden age for contemporary music and a soundtrack for a world trying to figure out these tumultuous times.
Artists who contracted COVID-19, including the legendary Marianne Faithfull and Australia’s Jaguar Jonze, returned to their works in progress when they were well enough to sing again.
From the awe-inspiring, chart history-making prolificacy of Taylor Swift to the unexpected coupling of Noah Cyrus and Australian hitmaker, producer and artist P.J. Harding, the pandemic lockdown has sparked so much good music.
Harding had moved to Los Angeles at the end of 2019 to continue working with Cyrus after they discovered a rare writing chemistry at a songwriting camp in Bali.
While the Australian producer was essentially working on music for her next project, when their song July blew up last year (more than half a billion streams), the pair decided to make a Noah Cyrus and P.J. Harding collaborative EP, People Don’t Change, which was released this week.
Dear August, written as “a love letter to the future” was the first single, and the rest of the tracks were written and recorded via the internet as Harding moved his family back home to Australia in August as the virus got out of control in the US.
“Writing over the internet doesn’t always work because there’s a level of non-verbal communication that happens when you are writing in a room with people,” Harding said.
“But it always feels natural with Noah; whenever we sit down to write a song together, we would get one most of the time. I think what we have found in collaboration is exceedingly rare and there’s just something about how our voices work together.”
Killing Heidi’s Ella Hooper wrote the songs for her new album Small Town Temple back in her hometown of Violet Town. She said collaborating over Zoom with friends in Nashville and sending demos to her producers kept her “slightly sane”.
“There must be a creative wave coming out of the pandemic. Musicians had nothing else to do, we couldn’t play gigs,” she said.
“If you were able to even just demo at home, you’re sitting on new songs. But then there’s a bit of a lull because it takes a while to finish things and get them out, that’s just the way the industry works.
“So I’m afraid I might join the great bottleneck of new music in 2021 where all the stuff we were working on last year, or all the stuff that people had finished but delayed from releasing last year, suddenly comes out.”
HERE’S SOME OF THE MUSIC COMING IN 2021
ADELE
We’re all hoping Adele’s album will be titled 32. And considering her 32nd birthday is on May 5, the arrival of her long-awaited fourth album may be imminent. There are definitely songs ready to rock, confirmed by her mate British funnyman Alan Carr who described them as “so amazing”. “That voice is like an old friend,” he said. Reports have listed a who’s who of collaborators including Mark Ronson, Ryan Tedder, Paul Epworth and Greg Kurstin. This is the record every other pop star on the planet does NOT want to go up against in the charts.
RIHANNA
Another pop star who has been teasing fans with cheeky Insta comments about new music … and not coughing up. R9 has been in the works since she released ANTI in 2016 but music has taken a back seat as RiRi’s Fenty clothing and make-up brands went interstellar. Pharrell Williams leads the list of Rihanna collabs describing the pop goddess as being “in a different place right now. Like, wow. She’s from a different world.”
TONES AND I
The Dance Monkey superstar is a songwriting demon. So every time her debut album has been close to finished, the prolific creative would compose another bunch of hits-in-waiting inspired by life events including the tragic death of her friend, footballer Ben Tournier. She signalled to fans on social media in March the record was almost done so you can pencil it in for release around August to qualify for the 2021 ARIA Awards.
P!NK
The What About Us pop superstar appears to have been wildly productive during lockdown. She recorded that warm blanket of a pop song, Cover Me In Sunshine with her daughter Willow Sage Hart – more than 50 million streams on Spotify – and is again commanding the airwaves this week with Anywhere Away From Here, the beautiful duet with Rag ‘N’ Bone Man. She also completed her documentary All I Know So Far, directed by The Greatest Showman filmmaker Michael Gracey, which airs on Amazon Prime Video on May 21. There could be even more P!nk new music later this year.
DAVE GROHL
The Foo Fighters frontman was extraordinarily busy during lockdown. His documentary What Drives Us is out next week and he finished post production on another film with his mother Virginia, based on her book From Cradle To Stage. The indefatigable rocker also wrote The Storyteller, a collection of moments from his life from childhood to swing dancing with AC/DC which is out later this year. Last week he suddenly appeared on the surprise new single from Mick Jagger about life in COVID called Eazy Sleazy and considering this man seems to say “yes” to everything, you can bet there are more collabs on the way.
BEBE REXHA
Like countless artists who had their records almost finished when COVID hit, the Meant To Be hitmaker’s plans for her second album Better Mistakes were put on hold. The hiatus gave her time to finesse the songs in the mixing process and she finally felt ready to green light the release this month, issuing the first single Sabotage ahead of the record’s release on May 7.
TAYLOR SWIFT
The Look What You’ve Made Me Do pop goliath appears to have been one of the most prolific artists during lockdown, making two record-breaking studio albums Folklore and Evermore. Then she made good on her promise of re-recording her back catalogue as a defiant riposte to it being sold to her nemesis Scooter Braun and released the first instalment Fearless (Taylor’s version). That release gave Swift her a historic third No. 1 record in nine months with more to come this year as she continues her innovative reissue campaign.
DEAN LEWIS
The Be Alright stream star finished touring his chart-topping debut album A Place We Knew at the end of 2019 so when COVID hit, he was ready to get stuck into writing that difficult second album. New single Falling Up signals a fine return-to-form, its reception giving Lewis the validation the songwriter needed to finish the final couple of songs for the record due for release later this year.
YOU AM I
The Australian rock warhorses found themselves with plenty of creative time on their hands when gigs stopped last year. Songwriting sessions which began tentatively in 2019 took on more urgency, with the band split into two camps due to closed state borders and working remotely. They finished 12 songs for their 11th studio album The Lives of Others which will be out on May 14.
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