Welcome back to another monthly playlist! We are nearing the summer months and even though the big festivals might not happen this year, it doesn’t mean that music won’t stop. I think it’s very important to say this out loud because for a lot of people out there, myself included, are always looking for the next big song that is sure to become their summer anthem. I think I might have found mine already but I’m not quite sure about everybody else’s tastes this year.
For me, May was definitely a heavy metal kind of month. At the beginning, I was listening to Sirius XM Octane and every week they help promote and play new songs from undiscovered talent all over the world. I have included two songs that I heard and immediately fell in love with on the spot. The first “Popular Monster” by Falling In Reverse and I think the main reason why I enjoy it so much is because it sounds like a Linkin Park song. I love how bands are changing up their styles with every record but I have started hearing a lot of older bands experimenting within their genre and really elevating what each is suppose to sound like, and I like how the legacy is the band is living on in that way!
The second song I recently heard is by a band called Dream State. They are a female fronted band based in the UK. Their new track called “Primrose” is so good and it came from their first album Primrose Path which came out in January. To me, it sounds like a mixture of In This Moment, Flyleaf (with Lacey Strum as vocals!) and The Pretty Reckless. If you haven’t heard the song or the full album yet, you need to do that soon! After discovering this band, I realized it was time to create another playlist on my Spotify dedicated to all and any new female fronted bands’ music and trust me when I say, it is glorious! You can click here to check out that playlist now!
Here are the rest of my Top 20 songs mentioned in the main May playlist!
Damn by LIVVIA Why Do You Love Me by Charlotte Lawrence Up All Night by Rachel Crow Breathin by Perlo Sick Individual by Halestorm Sunday Best by Surfaces Diamonds by Megan Thee Stallion featuring Normani Ain’t It Fun by Paramore Rainbow by Kacey Musgraves Eye Of The Tiger by Tommee Profitt x FJORA Riich by Grace Mitchell Claws by Charli XCX You Better Run by Unions Be Kind by Marshmello featuring Halsey If The World Was Ending by JP Saxe featuring Julia Michaels You Say by Lauren Diagle The In-Between by In This Moment Devil Pray by Madonna Break by Eyes Set To Kill Come For Me by New Years Day
Something that I have been doing a lot lately is actually listening to more albums. I always feel kind of guilty that I am not posting reviews of them, but I am proud of the fact that I can finally listen to a full album in one sitting and love it! My younger self would be somewhat horrified because I never did that until I was in high school. Speaking of which, I celebrate 10 years of being a high school graduate this month and I think I might do a blog post about my Top 10 songs I loved in the year 2010 in June. Oh, by the way, I was talking about my summer anthem at the top, but I forgot to mention that I even had one back in 2010 too. Can you guess what song it was? I doubt anybody will be able to get it right, but who knows somebody might surprise me!
If you want to look into the rest of this month’s playlist, click here and you will directed back to the page. Hope everyone has enjoyed this post!
This was inspired by a recent guest post written by friend and fellow blogger Rachel McRad on her Top 5 Favorite 80’s and 90’s Rap Songs! I had plans on telling you guys some of my favorite rap songs but then I came up with this alternative and figured that this would be better for me since I was listening to a bunch of different music while I was in high school.
I decided to talk about different artists and the albums they released throughout the years! It gives a better insight to what I liked to listen to in the different stages of my life. There are acts that I highlighted that will make you feel extremely old, and I even show you how influential every person was that I came into contact with at the time. If you’d like to see what all I was listening to after 2009, you can read this post as I published it in 2014! If you’re interested in seeing a blog post about my favorites prior to 2006, please let me know, and I can get started on it. I hope you’ll enjoy this for now though!
2006-2007
I started high school in the fall of 2006, as it was the same year that my family on my mom’s side watched two of my older cousins graduate high school earlier that spring. Boy, doesn’t that make you feel old?! Freshman year was a fairly easy time academically, socially was a totally different story and I’d rather not talk about it today!
I want to say from early 2003 to the end of 2007, I really dived into the depths of rap music. I thought it was cool that I grew up with the genre and listened to the legends with my mom, but once I became a teenager, I had to break out and find the next “great rapper” and everybody was either into West Coast or East Coast rap. I would actually go back and forth early on, but what I liked was hearing everything coming out of Atlanta, so there was a lot of Lil’ Jon and The East Side Boyz (they were my first rap album!), T.I., Ludacris, and Ciara.
As I was searching for different albums, I found two acts that I need to talk to about first. Does anybody remember Paula DeAnda? I was obsessed with her music! Her first album was really good, I used to love singing and dancing to her music! The other one though: Pretty Ricky. It’s shocking that all throughout my life I had been listening to rap music, I never once cared about the dirty lyrics that was on almost every song, but leave it to me at age 14 and discovering Pretty Ricky, a part of me is still disappointed with myself, but I loved their music anyways!
The only non-rap act I remember was Taylor Swift. She was just starting to have some radio play, and she was everywhere already! She was doing country music back then and I didn’t want anything to do with that genre. So I actually tried my best to dodge her in the beginning, but ultimately I lost the battle, because she became a staple in my days of high school. There were a few songs featured on her early albums that I couldn’t listen to or sing without thinking about one of my crushes!
2007-2008
Pop music seemed to be something I was really into towards the end of 2007, as I remember being really into both Carrie Underwood and Britney Spears’s new stuff. And poor Brit, this was the infamous year of her whole breakdown! “Blackout” isn’t part of her best work, but I have to say I actually enjoy it! The summer of 2007 saw the release of Paramore’s album “Riot” and since I was listening to both Flyleaf and Evanescene at the time, I do remember hearing both “Misery Business” and “crushcrushcrush”, but was never expressed as a big fan of theirs until much later!
Two acts that I really enjoyed were Danity Kane and Mariah Carey. I had watched the two seasons of Making The Band on MTV and was thrilled that both Aundrea and Aubrey made it through to second season and ultimately won it! I still listen to those early records on my iPod! However, I was never really into Mariah Carey growing up. My mom loved her though but once she came out of retirement, and changed into this diva that we now know her as, neither one of us can really care less! She released “E=MC²” and I actually liked it, but not as much as the “The Emancipation of Mimi” in 2005.
2008-2009
The first semester of junior year was a rough one, so I might be surprised if I even remember anything I liked in the last six months of 2008. This section might be a little bit short too!
One thing we have to point out, is that during the summer of 2008, Katy Perry appeared on the scene with a little song called “I Kissed A Girl” and I literally remember sitting in the backseat of the car with my mom and I had her turn it up because we were sitting out, waiting for dad of course! She and I were both amazed with the song, not because it was catchy, even though it was! It was the fact that it was a female singing the song, we both thought it was a guy! Who knew that song would have blown up as much as it did afterwards!
Another thing that happened during that summer, I got into New Kids On The Block! I know, I still freak myself out because I wasn’t really listening to Backstreet Boys’s newer stuff at the time, but I loved when they released “Summertime” and eventually their album “The Block” and I actually loved the crap out of it. We saw the start of Lady Gaga’s fame in this year! Before she released “The Fame” in August, she was featured as a new artist on NKOTB’s album. Unfortunately, I never listened to her whole album, same goes with Katy Perry’s “One Of The Boys”. I hardly ever listened to full albums prior to 2011 when I started reviewing them on here.
This was the year I began to see a change in my music. I didn’t want to listen to rap music anymore, well I listened to it, just not as religiously as I had in the years before. If I had included 2004 in this list, it would have been all about rap with a small fraction of pop-rock bands. Anyways, Shinedown released their album “The Sound Of Madness” and a certain song played freely on mainstream pop stations. This was the first album that I took notice before everything blew up for me the next year!
Unfortunately, I didn’t see anything that jumped at me that I would have listened to during the second semester or the beginning of 2009!
2009-2010
2009 was the year that my sister was in eighth grade, also known as her last year in middle school. Now something happens to practically every middle schooler towards the start of that year, your personality changes along with your style. When I was in eighth grade, almost all of my friends turned gothic, like I’m not kidding! Black clothing, fish nets, long-trashy pants that dragged across the floor were all the range! However, when my sister became an eighth grader, her class turned emo. So they had big hair, ten pounds of makeup, but instead of black and red colored clothes, they enjoyed pastels and skinny jeans! Excuse my language, but I was so fucking jealous, because it looked both non-threatening and less creepy compared to everybody I was around in school! Anyways, what does that have anything to do with the music I consumed? Everything.
Since my sister had plunged into the whole scene craze, she actually came out of it with some awesome music and this is where ALL of the rock music makes its appearance and a lot of it has Christian roots to it. So there’s both RED and Family Force 5, they had released albums earlier that year, but I didn’t start listening to them until probably November. She also came home with a lot of Skillet, and managed to get majority of our family into them! One of the others that she liked that I slowly started to listen to was Three Days Grace.
I actually got back into Backstreet Boys a little bit before they released their album “This Is Us” on October 6th. This was the year, I finally got myself a BSB shirt for Christmas! For someone who loved them as a kid, getting that shirt when I was finishing my final year of high school symbolized a lot for me! Now while I was liking some of the songs off of that record, I was more interested the album that was coming out the week after and it was Chester Bennington’s side project Dead By Sunrise, their album “Out Of Ashes” was my jam and it led the way into the rest of the rock acts.
This was the same year that we saw Justin Bieber as a little guy! And yes, as much as I tried to dodge him as well, I also fell into the trip! Thanks Blondie! I blame my sister for it too! As she was a freshman now, she was officially out of the emo scene now and learned how to correctly put on eyeliner. Not only was the Biebs a big hit, but apparently so was Adam Lambert. It still gets all of us that my nana would fall for him, and she still is into his stuff too! She’s even went to one of his concerts too! She had a crappy seat, but she can say that she went to hear him live, so that’s better than nothing!
I want to say that I basically spent the greater part of early 2010 trying to listen to any rock music I could, but of course I fell in love with both Ke$ha and Lady Antebellum. One of the weirdest musical acts I got into was Sleigh Bells. Now if you’ve never heard of them, they are extreme loud and obnoxious with their music, but somehow they worked on me!
So what do you think of my musical timeline? Would you like to see what else I was listening to for the next four years? Do you like you could figure the top four songs you liked while in high school?
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