San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Miley Cyrus, De La Soul, U2 heat up March
The Chronicle’s curated list of notable music releases this month.
NEW RELEASES Miley Cyrus, “Endless Summer Vacation” (Columbia)
Miley Cyrus gets a jump on the season by launching her “Endless Summer Vacation” on Friday, March 10.
The follow-up to her last studio album, 2020’s “Plastic Hearts,” this one has already made a big splash with its first single. “Flowers” was the most popular song in the world last month, holding onto the No. 1 position on the Billboard Global 200 for five weeks and counting.
The 30-year-old former Disney star’s eighth studio album features an all-star cast of producers, including Adele collaborator Greg Kurstin, and Kid Harpoon, best known for his work with Harry Styles. Cyrus describes the forthcoming release as a “love letter to L.A.,” where it was recorded. As evidenced by the cover art — which features the heavily toned pop superstar hanging from a helicopter on a trapeze bar while wearing a one-piece swimsuit — it celebrates her newfound focus on physical and mental wellness following her high-profile breakup with actor Liam Hemsworth.
Lana Del Rey, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” (Interscope)
To promote her ninth studio album, Lana Del Rey put up a single billboard in her exboyfriend’s hometown of Tulsa, Okla.
“Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd,” expected to drop on March 24, arrives two years after the Los Angeles singersongwriter’s previous releases, “Blue Banisters” and “Chemtrails Over the Country Club.” It features 16 tracks and includes several collaborators, including Father John Misty, Jack Antonoff ’s Bleachers and Jon Batiste.
Del Rey told Billboard the album goes even deeper on her personal family history than her prior releases.
“In this album, I got to really finish my thoughts and get super specific, which I was not comfortable with completely before,” she said. “I do list my grandpa, my brother, my dad, my Uncle Dave.”
Alongside the melancholy title track and first single, it features sure-to-be-somber songs such as “Taco Truck x VB” and “Grandfather Please Stand on the Shoulders of My Father While He’s Deep-Sea Fishing.”
Boygenius, “The Record” (Interscope)
The world’s most low-key supergroup — made up of indie singer-songwriters Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus — plans to release its long-awaited debut album on March 31.
The first three songs the group shared as a taster include “$20,” “Emily I’m Sorry”
and “True Blue,” each one brimming over with emotionally intense chords, gorgeously layered vocals and surprising ferocity. Despite the clear differences in their solo endeavors, the band members come together as one on “The Record,” recorded in Rick Rubin’s Malibu studio, marking their first major label release.
“There’s a realm in which I feel permitted to be ambitious in this band, in a way that I can’t for my own solo stuff because it’s something shared with people that I love who are the greatest songwriters ever,” Baker told Rolling Stone. “I feel an uncomplicated pride about it.”
’80s ICONS REIMAGINED Depeche Mode, “Memento Mori” (Columbia)
Depeche Mode’s 15th studio album, “Memento Mori,” is the group’s first since the death of founding member Andy “Fletch” Fletcher last year. The surviving members of the British synth-pop band, which was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2020, are no strangers to mining beautiful melodies from angst. The new album, which includes the ethereal single “Ghosts Again,” finds them digging deeper.
“We started work on this project early in the pandemic, and its themes were directly inspired by that time,” keyboardist Martin Gore said in a statement about the album set for release on March 24. “After Fletch’s passing, we decided to continue as we’re sure this is what he would have wanted, and that has really given the project an extra level of meaning.”
Depeche Mode, which also includes singer Dave Gahan, is set to open its tour in support of the album on March 23 at Golden 1 Center in Sacramento, followed by a stop on March 25 at SAP Center at San Jose.
U2, “Songs of Surrender” (Interscope)
Bono remains in a reflective mood after releasing his memoir, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” late last year. On U2’s latest release, he takes the rest of the band down the nostalgic rabbit hole with 40 new recordings of songs from the band’s back catalog. The set list for “Songs of Surrender,” out March 17, includes a mix of hits, deep cuts and even a few tracks fans likely ignored the first time around.
It’s not a strictly acoustic endeavor although many of the songs are stripped down to their essence — including familiar favorites like “Beautiful Day,” “Pride (In the Name of Love)” and “With or Without You.”
Bono said in his book that re-recording material from his past was a cathartic experience that gave him “a chance to live inside those songs again as I wrote this memoir. It also meant I could deal with something that’s been nagging me for some time. The lyrics on a few songs that I’ve always felt were never quite written. They are now.”
IN MEMORIAM Burt Bacharach & Elvis Costello, “The Songs of Bacharach & Costello” (UMe)
People had a chance to refamiliarize themselves with Burt Bacharach’s rich body of work following his death on Feb. 8, thanks to countless tribute reels that included classics such as “What the World Needs Now Is Love” and “I Say a Little Prayer.” A new box set, out Friday, March 3, looks at one of the most overlooked eras of the songwriter’s career.
“The Songs of Bacharach & Costello” explores the songwriter’s late-period collaborations with Elvis Costello. The set includes 19 unreleased recordings, including songs from a musical based on the duo’s 1998 album, “Painted From Memory.” There are several live recordings in the mix, such as a performance of “Anyone Who Had a Heart” from London’s Royal Festival Hall and “In the Darkest Place” from Melbourne, Australia.
Costello, who penned a 10,000-word essay for the project, said many of the songs they wrote together “reflect the stories and impulses of a group of people who are obsessive and vain, who are betrayed and become disappointed in life but long tenderly for a happier time, who are unfaithful, dishonest, destructive and turn out to be the inventors of a dangerous past, who are guilty, haunted and romantically deluded, desperate, vengeful and even cruel.”
De La Soul, “3 Feet High and Rising” (Chrysalis)
The reissue of De La Soul’s groundbreaking 1989 debut album, “3 Feet High and Rising,” finally hit streaming services Friday, March 3. Three decades later, the laidback, psychedelic-hued hiphop tracks like “Me Myself and I” and “Eye Know” remain as ambitious as ever. Following the death of David “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur in February, the songs have taken on an even deeper resonance.
“When I was a kid, I looked up to David Bowie and the Rolling Stones, who had proper careers — I always thought a rap artist should be able to do that,” Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer, told the Guardian. “I dreamed that De La Soul could be the Rolling Stones. Now, I look out over an audience at a festival or family show and see three generations of people. It’s absolutely humbling.”