Lizzo - "Juice"

In June we will be featuring all LGBTQ+ artists in honor of LGBTQ Pride Month

As a queer artist she’s new on the scene and still cagey about labels, but this song is undeniable. The Minneapolis rapper/flutist/meme legend continues her winning streak of sing-songy, funk-heavy rap with her latest single "Juice" and yet another meme-worthy music video to match.

"The juice ain't worth the squeeze if the juice don't look like this," Lizzo sings in the second verse. If we can muster up even a few drops of her fresh-squeezed, self-loving braggadocio to carry us all the way through the year, we should be all right.

“Juice” is a banger of a track, a summer dance hit if there ever was one, but released in January to help us heat up the winter. “If I’m shiny, everybody gonna shine” is my new political mantra, by the way! Glow up and bring your crew along! Community positivity. Her songs are always empowering and fun, and this track is no exception. And of course, that video! If you ever looked to Nicki Minaj or Meghan Trainor for your big girl pride jams, you need to prioritize Lizzo instead. “I’m not a snack, I’m a whole damn meal” is a MOOD.

So today, with a little extra squeeze, I choose Lizzo’s “Juice” as my, just a little more, be a snack, good to the last drop, song for a, make it a meal, all the pride you’ve got, make it juicy, Monday.

Elvis Presley - "Home Is Where the Heart Is"

The song says it perfectly: “Home is where the heart is, and my heart is anywhere you are.” That’s what family is. It’s the living breathing organism that you build around you, that is love personified.

So today, with hope in my handbasket, I choose Elvis Presley - "Home Is Where the Heart Is" as my, home is wherever you are, my heart is in your hands, home is where you make it, song for a, family can be found, circle your wagons, call home the pieces of your heart which you have given away, Friday.

Little Mix - "Hair"

Little Mix are a British girl group formed in 2011 during the eighth series of the UK version of The X Factor. They were the first group to win the competition, and following their victory, they signed with Simon Cowell's record label Syco Music and released a cover of Damien Rice's "Cannonball" as their winner's single. The members are Jade Thirlwall, Perrie Edwards, Leigh-Anne Pinnock, and Jesy Nelson.

Little Mix released their debut album DNA in 2012, which peaked inside the top 10 in ten countries including the UK and US. This made Little Mix the first girl group since the Pussycat Dolls to reach the US top five with their debut album, as well as earning the highest debut US chart position for a British girl group's first release, breaking the record previously held by the Spice Girls. The group's second album Salute (2013) became their second album to debut inside the top 10 in both the UK and US. Their third album Get Weird was released in 2015. Their fourth album Glory Days (2016) became their first number one album in the UK, and also achieved the longest-reigning girl group number one album since the Spice Girls' debut album 20 years earlier, and the highest first week UK album sales for a girl band since 1997. In the UK, the group has earned four number-one singles, including "Wings", "Black Magic" and "Shout Out to My Ex". Their fifth studio album LM5 was released in 2018 to generally favourable reviews.

The group won Best British Single for "Shout Out to My Ex" at the 2017 Brit Awards and they won Best British Video for "Woman Like Me" at the 2019 Brit Awards; they have also received several other awards during their career, including three MTV Europe Music Awards, two Teen Choice Awards and two Glamour Awards. As of August 2018, the group has achieved four platinum certified albums and sixteen certified singles in the UK. Little Mix appeared on Debrett's 2017 list of the most influential people in the UK.

Some days you just need a little fluffy fun pop! This song is the epitome of bubble gum pop. The bright side of that, is that it checks every single bubble gum pop box, and is just a great summer bop because of it.

So today, with a bounce in my step and the sun in my hair, I choose Little Mix’s “Hair” as my, go on and smile, laugh it out, the day is what you make it, song for a break the routine, curl it, bleach it, cut it, just go ahead and do it, Thursday.

Kris Kristofferson - "Don't Let The Bastards Get You Down"

Kris Kristofferson has been making things happen his entire life. Born in Texas and raised in a military family, he was a Golden Gloves boxer who studied creative writing at Pomona College in California. The Phi Beta Kappa graduate earned a Rhodes scholarship to study literature at Oxford, where he boxed, played rugby and continued to write songs. After graduating from Oxford, Kristofferson served in the army as an Airborne Ranger helicopter pilot and achieved the rank of Captain. In 1965, Kristofferson turned down an assignment to teach at West Point and, inspired by songwriters like Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, moved to Nashville to pursue his music.

“When I was in the army, I was one of the few people outside of his personal friends who knew about Willie Nelson,” Kristofferson recalls. “I listened to a disc jockey who happened to be a Willie fan. He would play Willie’s songs and talk about him all the time. By the time I got to Nashville, he was a superhero to me. For guys like me, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson were two gods we worshipped. Then Willie and I got to be best friends. I came from a position of idolizing him to finding out he’s the funniest son of a bitch you could be around.”

After struggling in Music City for several years, Kristofferson achieved remarkable success as a country songwriter at the start of the 1970s. His songs “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” and “For the Good Times,” all chart-topping hits, helped redefine country songwriting. By 1987, it was estimated that more than 450 artists had recorded Kristofferson’s compositions.

His renown as a songwriter triggered Kristofferson’s successful career as a performer and that, in turn, brought him to the attention of Hollywood, leading to his flourishing career as a film actor. Kristofferson has acted in more than 70 films.  In 1977 He won a Golden Globe for Best Actor in “A Star Is Born.”  He’s appeared in cult favorites including the “Blade” trilogy, “Lone Star,” “A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries,” “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” “Blume In Love,” “Cisco Pike,” and “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.” Recent films include “Fast Food Nation,”  “Dreamer: Inspired By A True Story,” “The Jacket,” “Silver City,” “He’s Just Not That In To You,” and “Dolphin Tale.”

Heralded as an artist’s artist, the three-time GRAMMY winner has recorded 29 albums, including three with pals Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings as part of the Highwaymen. Kristofferson has spent three decades performing concerts all over the world, in most recent years in a solo acoustic setting, which puts the focus on the songs. “There’s an honesty in the sparseness.  It feels like direct communication to the listener,” he says.  “I still have more fun when I’m with the band, but being alone is freer, somehow.  It’s like being an old blues guy, just completely stripped away.”

Many would have hung their hat by now. Instead, Kristofferson barely has paused for breath. He’s released several recent high watermarks including the increasingly intimate A Moment of Forever (1995), The Austin Sessions (1999) and This Old Road (2006), and he produced some of his finest work with the deeply personal Closer to the Bone (2009) and Feeling Mortal (2013). Kristofferson has reached living legend status, but that hasn’t changed or hindered his creativity. His current CD, The Cedar Creek Sessions, was recorded live at Austin’s Cedar Creek Recording Studio in June 2014. Released in time for Kristofferson’s 80th birthday in 2016, the double-CD set is a snapshot of the legendary songwriter in the twilight of his life.

In addition to many other awards, Kristofferson is a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, winner of the prestigious Johnny Mercer Award from the Songwriter Hall of Fame, and was honored with the American Veteran’s Association’s “Veteran of the Year Award” in 2002. For Kristofferson’s 70th birthday in 2006, his friends and admirers gifted him with a tribute CD, The Pilgrim: A Celebration of Kris Kristofferson. Stars including Willie Nelson, Russell Crowe, Emmylou Harris, Gretchen Wilson, Rosanne Cash, and Brian McKnight recorded 17 of Kristofferson’s compositions for the tribute. In 2007, Kristofferson was honored with the Johnny Cash Visionary Award from Country Music Television and in 2009 BMI lauded Kristofferson with the Icon Award.  He received the Frances Preston Music Industry Award from the T.J. Martell Foundation in March, 2012. In 2014, Kristofferson was honored with a GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award and the PEN Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence Award.

This song just kinda cements for me that some days are tough, and it’s ok to call them out for it, and then LAUGH about it. Life just isn’t that serious, and there’s no need to get upset about things that bear no consequence.

So today, with a smirk and a chuckle, I choose Kris Kristofferson’s "Don't Let The Bastards Get You Down" as my bang your own drum, shake it off, laugh out loud, song for a, break open the piggy bank, spit out the seeds, dust off the cobwebs, Wednesday.

Noah Reid - "Simply The Best (Tina Turner Cover)"

Most people know him as Patrick from Schitt’s Creek. Comedic straight man, who plays the adorably sensible counterpart to the show’s lead character. Noah Reid is the kind of actor that will constantly surprise you with their depth and talent. In 2016, he received a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Original Song for his work in the feature film People Hold On, and In 2019, he won a Canadian Screen Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy for his stellar work on Schitt's Creek.

This song has just been popping up in my life a lot lately. It was sung around the office a lot last week, and this past weekend, I saw it performed live at the Schitt’s Creek Live Talk Back.

The original, iconic, version is legendary, and anyone attempting to recreate Tina’s magic, is crazy, but this quiet, tender, heartfelt version captured something breathtakingly true. It captured the feeling you let yourself fall into in the beginning of a relationship. During the whirlwind of romance and laughter, when you are breathless with joy and you look over at the person and can not stop smiling, only to get nervous hoping they like you back as much as you are beginning to like them. This is the magic Noah Reid found.

So today, holding hope in hands like a hummingbird, I choose Noah Reid’s version of Tina Turner’s "Simply The Best” from Schitt’s Creek as my, here I go again, maybe this time, life is a cabaret, song for a, shed the skin that is restricting your movement, don’t be so precious with it, wake up Pearl, Tuesday.

Yola - "Ride Out In The Country"

This is the easy, laid back, summer song we didn’t know we needed. It’s been a stressful few months over here. Heck, it’s been a stressful few YEARS and so when this song came on today it was just the soothing balm that our weary nerves needed. A callback to our youth in Texas and the great country/americana artists we grew up on, mixed with the sultry blues of this british soul singer has come together to make real magic with this song and this artist. If you don’t know Yola, get ready to.

It was the end of summer when Yola – or Yolanda Quartey, as she was then – fell behind on her rent. Her flatmate got sick and had to move out; Yola was 21, a young singer still finding her feet in London’s cut-throat music industry. When her landlord required her to leave, she was confident she would find someone to stay with until she landed her next job. “I knew it was going to be fine,” she says, shrugging her shoulders. “If I could just hold on a teeny bit longer.”

It wasn’t fine, though. The friends and colleagues she called were all very sorry, but taking her in wasn’t convenient. “The rejections were all very gentle, very reasonable, but ultimately I was on my own,” she says. “Then I ran out of credit on my phone, so I couldn’t call anyone.” Yola spent the next few nights sleeping on the streets.

More than a decade later, the ebullient singer-songwriter is releasing her debut album, Walk Through Fire, at the age of 35. She shrugs off her spell of homelessness with characteristic good humour. “There’s a bush in Hoxton Square, and I made a big old hole in it,” she remembers. “I was begging for food in my artsy harem pants and people were saying: ‘What are you doing here?’ And I was saying: ‘It all went wrong, my friends suck.’”

Yola’s personality fills the room, just as it fills her record – a buffet of country-soul and break-up songs, backed with fiddle, mandolin, Wurlitzer and more, and produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys on his own Easy Eye label. It isn’t just the big, blunt end of Yola’s powerhouse voice that impresses – although that gets an immediate outing in the chorus of the opening track, Faraway Look. Its real magic lies in its depths of emotion and experience, and a dynamic range that can move from comforting whisper to full-on war cry within the space of a couple of lines.

That idea–of escaping one’s past life by any means necessary–ended up serving as the central premise for the the title track of Walk Through Fire, the singer’s debut album for Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye label. Recorded in Nashville with a team of the city’s best session musicians, the record chronicles the personal and artistic rebirth that Yola has undergone over the past few years. Many of the songs, like “Shady Grove” and “Ride Out In The Country,” are belated breakup songs, addressed not only to a ex-lover but to a previous self.

Yola Carter caught the music bug as a small child growing up in a tiny seaside town in southwest England. Browsing through her mother's varied record collection, she latched onto the 1974 Dolly Parton album Jolene. It never crossed the singer's mind that that wasn't what an aspiring, young singer who happened to be black and British was supposed to be listening to and learning from in the late 1980s.

"I didn't know that that was going to be such a problem until I started trying to actually do it," she remembers. "And then people were like 'OK, now this is weird, we always thought that you'd sing R&B,' and I'm like, 'Why? My voice doesn't sound like that at all.' "

The lushly, orchestrated backing the players provided gave Carter room to stretch out vocally. "I don't want to be ever controlled down to a trope of vocal, always-loud Yola, always doing the scream rough thing," she says. "Because I can do that all day, everyday. But I want to be able to show that I have control as well and I have a soft side of my voice as well."

The virtuosic way that Carter taps into the softer, more theatrical side of classic country, soul and pop, along with the grit, isn't the expected approach in the Americana world she now calls home. But she's at the place in her career where she's not about to be boxed in.

"That's the thing that feels satisfying to me, is to be able to be that vulnerable, out loud as a black woman," she says. "To go, 'You know what? Today, I'm feeling quite like a strong black woman, but I'm not every single day, and here's how.' "

So when you wrap all this vulnerability, beauty, talent, and music into one big beautiful human, you have Yola. I am awestruck by the grace in which she has slowly risen from her beginning stumbles. She is a true inspiration.

So today, with grace and fortitude, I choose Yola's "Ride Out In The Country" as my, open up and breath, let the wind fly through your hair, remember how strong your roots are, song for a, bend but don't break, you remove the overgrown so that you can grow back stronger, lift your face to the light, Wednesday.

Johann Strauss ll - "The Blue Danube"

Some days you just have to get on board with and roll right along, just like you were floating down the river. There’s no way off, so you may as well sit back and enjoy the ride.

If you feel sorry for shop assistants forced from November onwards to listen to Christmas music, spare a thought for the citizens of Vienna. All year round, in restaurants, shops, and hotels, there is no escaping The Blue Danube waltz.

It is the most famous waltz ever written – actually not one waltz but a chain of five interlinked waltz themes. It is Austria’s second national anthem. It is the inescapable conclusion to each New Year’s Day concert in Vienna. But how many of us have ever heard Strauss’s original version? 

"The Blue Danube" is the common English title of "An der schönen blauen Donau", Op. 314 (German for "By the Beautiful Blue Danube"), a waltz by the Austrian composer Johann Strauss II, composed in 1866. Originally performed on 15 February 1867 at a concert of the Wiener Männergesangsverein (Vienna Men's Choral Association), it has been one of the most consistently popular pieces of music in the classical repertoire. Its initial performance was considered only a mild success, however, and Strauss is reputed to have said, "The devil take the waltz, my only regret is for the coda—I wish that had been a success!"

In 1865, Johann Herbeck, choirmaster of the Vienna Men’s Choral Society, commissioned Strauss to write a choral work; due to the composer’s other commitments the piece wasn’t even started. The following year, Austria was defeated by Prussia in the Seven Weeks’ War. Aggravated by post-war economic depression, Viennese morale was at a low and so Strauss was encouraged to revisit his commission and write a joyful waltz song to lift the country’s spirit. 

Strauss recalled a poem by Karl Isidor Beck (1817-79). Each stanza ends with the line: ‘By the Danube, beautiful blue Danube’. It gave him the inspiration and the title for his new work – although the Danube could never be described as blue and, at the time the waltz was written, it did not flow through Vienna. To the waltz, the choral society’s “poet” Josef Weyl added humorous lyrics ridiculing the lost war, the bankrupt city and its politicians: “Wiener seid’s froh! Oho! Wieso?” (“Viennese be happy! Oho! But why?”). 

The premiere of the Waltz For Choir at Vienna’s Dianabadsaal (Diana Bath Hall) took place on February 15, 1867. Considering its subsequent popularity, its reception was somewhat muted (apparently it received only one encore, which in Strauss’s terms equalled a flop). This may have been due to the fact that both the choir and the audience hated the words. But when, later that year, Strauss introduced the waltz in its orchestral garb to Paris at the World Exhibition, it created a sensation. 

It’s said that Strauss’s publisher received so many orders for the piano score that he had to make 100 new copper plates so that he could print over a million copies. Twenty-three years later, Franz von Gernerth, a member of the Austrian Supreme Court, composed a more dignified text for the melodies of the waltz: "Donau, so blau, so blau" ("Danube, so blue, so blue").

After the original music was written, the words were added by the Choral Association's poet, Joseph Weyl.  Strauss later added more music, and Weyl needed to change some of the words.  Strauss adapted it into a purely orchestral version for the 1867 Paris World's Fair, and it became a great success in this form. The instrumental version is by far the most commonly performed today. An alternate text was written by Franz von Gernerth, "Donau so blau" (Danube so blue). "The Blue Danube" premiered in the United States in its instrumental version on 1 July 1867 in New York, and in Great Britain in its choral version on 21 September 1867 in London at the promenade concerts at Covent Garden.[citation needed]

When Strauss's stepdaughter, Alice von Meyszner-Strauss, asked the composer Johannes Brahms to sign her autograph-fan, he wrote down the first bars of The Blue Danube, but adding "Leider nicht von Johannes Brahms" ("Alas! not by Johannes Brahms").

So today, with acceptance and a little smile, I choose Johann Strauss ll’s "The Blue Danube" as my, rolling down the river, hold on to your hat, pull up your splash guard, song for a, dance as long as you can, lift yourself into the music, take time to rest but remember that you must raise your voice to be heard, Tuesday.

Nat "King" Cole - "Unforgettable"

Nat King Cole crowns a very short list of the most identifiable and memorable voices in American music. This ground breaking American icon’s impact continues to cross the world’s cultural and political boundaries. The story of his life is a study in success in the face of adversity and the triumph of talent over the ignorance of prejudice.

Nat Cole’s “unforgettable” voice, with its honeyed velvet tones in a rich, easy drawl, is one of the great moments in music, and saw him accepted in a “white” world. With high profile friends, such as Frank Sinatra, his position entailed compromises that gained him the hostility of civil rights activists in the early 1960s. But Cole was a brave figure in a period when racial prejudice was at its most demeaning, Cole suffered the indignity of being “whited up” for some of his TV performances, to make him more “accessible” to a white audience. Before his death from lung cancer in 1965, Cole was planning a production of James Baldwin’s play, “Amen Corner,” displaying an interest in radical black literature at odds with his image as a sugary balladeer.

So today, with happy memories floating around my brain, I choose Nat “King” Cole’s “Unforgettable” as my, shine up, hold on, let go of the things that no longer serve, song for a, break open, give in, let happiness flow through you like a river through the woods, Monday.