#36 - Daisies and oranges 🌞

Happy Sunlighter Sunday! This week, we're changing the format of our Artist of the Week section so you can discover more in less time.

Here's what we have queued up this week:

1. 🌶️ Review of AURORA by Daisy Jones & The Six.

2. 🔀 Playlist Updates: Dagny, Ethel Cain, and Niall Horan.

3. 💿 This Week in Music: Spotify reveals algorithm, PUNX NFT drop, and hope for a One Direction reunion.

4. 🎙️ Emotional Oranges is our artist of the week.

Rating Rationale: 👋 Donya here! I read Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid last summer, and it was one of those, “wow I know I’m gonna be late to a party but I can’t put this down because I have to know what happens next,” kind of stories. Now a limited series airing on Amazon Prime, it centers on the rise of the fictional rock band in the 70s, and it’s everything I was expecting and more. The chemistry between the main characters Billy and Daisy is subtle yet electric, and watching them bring the songs Reid so articulately described to life makes it even more incredible to watch. Better yet? The songs are packaged into an album (which the TV band may or may not be touring sometime soon 👀). Deeply inspired by the likes of Fleetwood Mac (the show even features “Gold Dust Woman” during a pivotal moment in episode 8), Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and Crosby, Stills & Nash, and creating the album was no small feat after the book describes every song on the record was destined to be a hit. Reid worked together with Amazon and songwriters/producers Blake Mills and Chris Weisman to curate the band’s Aurora album. The tracks I have on repeat right now are “Let Me Down Easy,” “Look At Us Now (Honeycomb)” which Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons co-wrote, “Regret Me,” and “The River.”

The Sunlighter Playlists 🔀

As promised, we've revamped our original playlist by making a few changes:

1. On Repeat: our original, curated playlist will now get updated more frequently each week to keep things fresh.

2. Greatest Hits: songs that get removed from On Repeat will fall into this curation repository playlist.

If you have any preferences or feedback on additional playlists, let us know in the comments below and we can look to curate one!

This Week in Music 💿

🔐 Spotify Algorithm: Following Twitter’s lead, Spotify published its music discovery algorithm in a 7-minute YouTube video.

🤖 Grimes says bring on the AI: After the Drake x The Weeknd AI debacle last week, Grimes agrees to split royalties 50% with any song using her “creative likeness.”

🥳 Happy 90th Willie: Yesterday was Willie Nelson’s 90th birthday, and Spotify has a dedicated playlist to celebrate, including covers from Margo Price and The War and Treaty.

🛻 #1 Trucks: In the last month, rising country star who we covered in one of our earliest editions, Lainey Wilson, scored her first #1 hits with “Heart Like A Truck” and “wait in the truck” feat. HARDY.

🤔 Thinking Out Loud: Nearly 10 years after the song’s release, Ed Sheeran goes to court for his Grammy award-winning song “Thinking Out Loud,” being accused of copyright infringement.

💎 No pressure, no diamonds: Largely due to his contributions to Post Malone’s records, Louis Bell becomes the first songwriter in history to obtain 8 RIAA Diamond singles. Bell’s repertoire includes “Sunflower,” “Congratulations,” “Better Now,” “Circles,” “Psycho,” “rockstar,” “Without Me” by Halsey, and “Havana” by Camila Cabello.

✌🏼 Bye Bye Merch Lines: Earlier this week, Bandsintown announced an integration feature with Shopify, which allows artists to display their merchandise alongside upcoming tour dates.

👨🏼‍🎤 If you ain’t no PUNX: 3LAU and Steve Aoki, two of the biggest trailblazers in the web3 music space, are joining forces as “PUNX.” Under this project, they dropped a new single called “Concentrate,” where they promise 50% royalties will return to artist NFT token holders.

🎙️ YouTube vs. Clubhouse: While YouTube Music is slowly rolling out its free podcast offering (and leveraging a way to use AI ads to better connect with Gen Z) Clubhouse announces 50% layoffs in order to focus more on shifting its product strategy.

💰 Buckle up, Spotify subscribers: CEO Daniel Ek is negotiating with partners on raising the overall streaming service’s monthly price to $10.99 per user.

🍦 Sunlighter Sundaes: Ben & Jerry’s shared its festival will be returning to Bristol Amphitheatre on August 5th, where attendees only pay 10 Euros for a ticket and receive unlimited desserts. Nothing sweeter than that.

📼 Old School, No-Skip: As society leans more into nostalgia these days, it comes as no surprise that cassette tapes are seeing a major comeback. The United Kingdom reports sales are up to the highest they’ve been in 20 years.

 🎫 Posh Funds: After acquiring over 500,000 users and $30M in tickets, event management and ticketing startup company, Posh, officially goes live with a $5M seed fund.

🤠 Swamp Savant: Diplo is in his country music era, and we're kind of digging it. As a follow-up to the Chapter 1 album in 2020, Diplo Presents Thomas Wesley: Chapter 2 - Swamp Savant was released on Friday with new features from Sturgill Simpson, Parker McCollum, ERNEST, and Leon Bridges among many others.

🌞 The Sun…Lighter?: The alternative-folk sister trio JOSEPH debut their third studio album, The Sun.

💪🏼 Common ground ain’t that common: Jack Harlow drops his eighth studio album, Jackman. Stay tuned to hear our take on next week’s UV Index.

👿 Features of Frankenstein: The National released their latest studio album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, which features Taylor Swift, Sufjan Stevens, and Phoebe Bridgers.

🏖️ Beachy keen: Didn’t get enough of Beach House’s 4-part 2022 album? They’ve got you. Through the release of their Become EP, listen to 5 songs from the Once. Twice. Melody sessions.

😱 Cue the fangirling: Harry Styles shares a One Direction reunion is never out of the question, as long as all members are on board, we can all relive history.

Artist of the Week: Emotional Oranges 🎙️

Primer: Orange is a great color, a great fruit, and turns out, it’s a great sound too.

Who are the Emotional Oranges? That’s part of the allure. The R&B duo mostly operate in anonymity (we’re ruining that this week, sorry) by branding their identities with the dual-meaning monikers of “A” and “V,” which describe both their real names as well as their formation story. Initially, “A,” an audio engineer for Drake, and “V,” a vocal coach for Adele, met at a bat mitzvah in 2017 through their mutual friend, Ray, with the intention to collaborate on a project that eventually evolved into Emotional Oranges. Apart from the shroud of their carefully crafted incognito brand, “A,” stands for “Azad,” and, “V,” stands for Vali, a nod to V’s middle name.

More about A: Azad Naficy grew up in Venice to Iranian immigrant parents who fled from the Ayatollah during the Iranian Revolution to the United States. As his father experienced simultaneous success in transgressive poetry and the trauma of losing his first wife and brother as casualties to the new oppressive regime in Iran, the impact was formative for Azad as a first-generation music artist. Growing up, “A,” earned a reputation as a battle rapper before taking on more technical roles in the music industry, which included a stint as the Vice President of the indie record label Mind of a Genius (ZHU, Gallant, THEY., etc.).

More about V: Vali, or Kelly “Valentine” Porter, grew up in New York City to mostly a single mother, a Russian ballet dancer, who previously met Vali’s father, an African-American classical composer, in Paris during a performance of The Nutcracker. While attending the renowned performing arts high school, LaGuardia, Vali focused on progressing her vocals with the intention of pursuing a career on Broadway. Once she realized some of the limitations of character expressiveness in theatre, she transitioned to becoming a background dancer before focusing build her own creative, irreplaceable character as a music artist.

Where did the name Emotional Oranges come from? It was a three-step process: smoking pot, contemplating life, and then skydiving.

Theatrics and Diligence: Similar to masked contemporaries like Daft Punk and Sia, theatrics play a role in the abstract style of the Emotional Oranges. V’s past experience in theater performance and A’s reserved yet calculated intentions are immediately felt in both the design and in-person presentation of the Emotional Oranges. Ranging from the direction of their music videos and live performances (in which the duo will at times “pull the veil back”), to the near-obsessive use of the number eight in their tracklist for albums, the diligent cloak-and-dagger approach is what keeps us at the edge of our seat.

Current Label: Avant Garden Records

Genre: Alternative R&B, a true blend of elements from multiple genres.

Influences: The duo primarily draws inspiration from R&B and hip-hop artists like Sade (who both were introduced to by their parents), Lauryn Hill, Prince, Janet Jackson, Aaliyah, Foreign Exchange, Beyoncé, Kanye, Nas, and Michael Jackson.

Outro: As V once said in an interview with The Line of Best Fit: “Sunrise, sunset. Orange is all the emotions.” They just dropped their newest single, “Justified” on Friday:

Finally, check out their interview with fellow Avant Garden signee and podcast personality, Rory:

Wrap Up 👏

We're closing the newsletter this week with more emotional fruit.

Check out our other articles and give us a follow on Twitter!

See ya next Sunday 😎

Chris and Donya