The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Swift’s heartbreak dreamscape, more new songs
■ Taylor Swift, ‘Cardigan’ Taylor Swift is officially a grown-up now; she’s 30. She has a past, personal and historical. She offers perspective on her eighth album, “Folklore”: somber and pensive with producer Aaron Dessner (from the National) and slightly more banging but still somber with producer Jack Antonoff. Her gift for capturing a moment and an emotion in staccato, concrete one- or two-syllable images comes through her collaborations like “Cardigan” (with Dessner): “Dancing in your Levi’s, drunk under a streetlight.” She sings about how little she knew “when I was young,” letting someone deceive her about how “I was your favorite.” More important, she shows that she has lived through it.
■ Courtney Marie Andrews, ‘Guilty’
Courtney Marie Andrews’ luminous new album, “Old Flowers,” anatomizes the aftermath of breaking up: loneliness, bittersweet memories, recriminations, regrets, temptations, lessons of experience. “Guilty” is slow and plaintive, reluctantly trudging onward like a Neil Young piano ballad as it unveils its increasingly tangled romantic dilemmas.
■ Deaton Chris Anthony, ‘I Love All My Friends’
Here’s a palate cleanser: a dreamy, elegiac, sweet song about hanging with your welldressed buddies that blends electro-R&B thump and indie rock desolation and ends somewhere near “My Boo.”
■ Headie One and Drake, ‘Only You Freestyle’
Over on TikTok, Drake’s toedip into Arabic on this song is triggering several types of responses. Some of the funniest are ones that arch eyebrows at his pronunciation. And some of the purest are ones where young people play the lyrics for their mothers, who blush.
■ Somi, ‘Ankara Sundays’ A vocalist with roots in East Africa teams up with a big band from Germany under the guest direction of a Louisianian arranger to sing an original song that was first recorded on an album inspired by Nigerian music. It’s easy to lose your place on the map when listening to Somi; maybe that’s the idea. On “Ankara Sundays,” over a 21-beat pattern teased out by a finger-plucked guitar and tinkling cymbals, her plumlike alto unfurls the story of a woman who finds respite from weekdays of thankless toil in a Sunday celebration. As the groove deepens, the reeds and brass of the Frankfurt Radio Big Band swarm around Somi’s voice, rendering it almost weightless, until finally, singing in wordless harmony with the flutes, it evaporates into air.