A Poem — The harbor is carved like a glacier ran through it at low tide the wet mud flats glow pink under the fading sun light. A film over drudgery fishing nets and lobster traps beached like the sea creatures they were designed to catch. Houses perched on stilts their paint wearing…

A look back at the marketing of Swift’s sixth album — I confess: even as an avid Swiftie when Taylor Swift released “Look What You Made Me Do,” I was disappointed. A three-year wait for this? The optimist I looked to in life, the singer of “Shake it Off” and “Clean,” had become so pessimistic. Swift released her first five albums…

A poem I try to find meaning in life in the billboards and flashing lights but they’re all just advertisements for a product that’s already mine. Keeping ourselves amused ‘til death the purpose of life is to make it make sense the cells alone survived before the first human ever took a breath…

She’s not gonna write you a pop song. In a November 2019 show, Sara Bareilles achieved a dream she once thought impossible: headlining the Hollywood Bowl. A stop on her 2019 Amidst the Chaos Tour, Bareilles created an intimate experience indicative of the coffee-shop folk of her most recent studio…

They don’t really know what makes you beautiful Bubblegum pop made a strong comeback in the early 2010s after guitar sounds and emo pop-rock dominated the early 00s. Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream broke Michael Jackson’s record for the number of number one hits from a single album, and Meghan Trainor’s…

An analysis of Taylor Swift’s lead singles — Taylor Swift tends to shock people with her lead singles. Not that Taylor Swift can do anything truly shocking, besides be interrupted by Kanye West, or canceled by Kim Kardashian. But the lyric, “Hey kids! Spelling is fun!” in “ME!” (featuring Brandon Urie), the lead single for her seventh album…

We’ll always be calling her back. — Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” dominated radio waves in the summer of 2012. It asserted the relevance of bubblegum pop in a culture about to abandon it for alternative pop that would start with Lana Del Rey in 2012 and culminate in Billie Eilish in 2019. “Call Me Maybe”…

Shall we call it…the tragicom-dramedy? — Netflix’s Dead To Me arrived unapologetically in the wake of HBO’s Big Little Lies, but doesn’t become beholden to the shadow it is meant to exist in. Both shows are about a mysterious death in a well-off California neighborhood and focus on the stories of mothers in the wake of…

Paint the town…red? — On Valentine’s Day 2021, Taylor Swift released the rerecorded version of “Love Story” (titled “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)”): a layup in terms of marketing for Swift. First of all, the original song already retells a classic piece of literature with Swift’s shameless fingerprint: it’s the story of a couple from…