#34 - Rina's reclamation 🌞

Happy Sunlighter Sunday! Coachella officially kicked off the 2023 festival circuit over the weekend, and as always, there were plenty of surprise guests. blink-182 reunited, Bad Bunny brought out Post Malone, MUNA brought out boygenius, Charli XCX brought out Troye Sivan, Labrinth brought out Billie Eilish, Calvin Harris brought out Ellie Goulding, The Kid LAROI brought out Fivio Foreign, DOMi and JD BECK brought out Mac DeMarco and Thundercat, Kaytranada brought out Kali Uchis and Aminé, Metro Boomin' brought out everyone else (John Legend, The Weeknd, Future, Don Toliver, and 21 Savage).

Here's what we have queued up this week:

1. 🌶️ Review of Higher than Heaven by Ellie Goulding.

2. 🔀 Sunlighter x Music Club Playlist: Festival Season Warmup

3. 💿 This Week in Music: A monumental week for Latin music, Jai Paul debut, and Mastercard NFTs.

4. 🎙️ Rina Sawayama is our artist of the week.

Chris: Before we jump in, one thing to note about Ellie Goulding’s albums is they often don’t take a standard format. Take Halcyon, for example. The Halcyon standard album was re-released in three versions: 1. Halcyon (Deluxe) with “I Need Your Love,” 2. Halcyon Nights with both “I Need Your Love” and “Burn,” and 3. Halcyon Days with “Burn” and “Lights.” This makes it more challenging to rate her albums in totality. While Delirium was probably her best performing album, Brightest Blue isn’t too far off if you include EG.0 (Side B of Brightest Blue). What I will say is her fifth studio album, Higher Than Heaven, doesn’t exactly reach the same heights as her previous albums. It feels two years too late, particularly due to production choice. KOZ, one of the primary producers of the album, implements the same 80s-inspired nostalgia pop that he’s credited for in Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia. That sound has come and gone, yet, Ellie Goulding still chose to join the bandwagon late by focusing on that sound in this album. Aside from that, her vocal ability is still top-tier, and “Tastes Like You” (Deluxe) and “Easy Lover” are worth a listen.

Donya: Ellie Goulding has one of the most generation-defining voices in pop music. One of my best friends from high school burned a CD of her debut album Lights for me in 2011, and listening to it for the first time still remains such a core memory. In the years that followed, the entire world grew to know and love her crystal-clear tone and ethereal soprano voice through mega-hits like “Anything Could Happen,” “I Need Your Love,” “Burn,” “Love Me Like You Do,” and “Close To Me.” Although she’s had tremendous commercial success, no album has topped her debut–not even this one. Like most other albums, it has its fair share of hits (“Cure For Love,” “Easy Lover”), but Side A is far superior to Side B, no contest.

Sunlighter x Music Club Playlist 🔀

You can always count on us to be your friends with the aux. This week, we’re collaborating with our fellow music newsletter creator, Lora Larson Miller, to build a festival warm-up playlist to gear up for the festival season.

Lora runs Music Club, a music newsletter focused on music discovery for humans, by humans. She provides three types of newsletters: “Human Algorithm,” which is a weekly curated mix, “HA Takeover,” which is a monthly curated mix from a special guest, and “Monthly Edition,” which kicks off every month with a Q&A from people in the music space. Lora was kind enough to ask us to participate in the April Spotlight, which you can read here. If you’re a fan of music discovery, subscribe to Music Club.

This Week in Music 💿

We’re adding a pop of color to this week’s updates, so you can scroll to the sections you care about most.

🔥 A monumental week for Latin music: The RIAA shared that streaming contributed to $1.06 billion of the overall $1.1 billion earned in Latin music revenues in 2022. Bad Bunny becomes the first Latino headliner of the Coachella music festival. The Library of Congress announced on Wednesday that Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina” would be the first reggaeton song to be inducted to the National Recording Registry.

📈 The Digital Media Association reports that streaming continues its reign as king by contributing over $14 billion to the U.S. economy in 2021. The trajectory isn’t stopping anytime soon, with Luminate sharing listeners having collectively spent 960,000 years in streaming in 2023 alone.

💰 Kobalt Music Group increased its operating profits by 71.1% YoY from last fiscal year. We can only imagine results for this upcoming year after strategic decisions to sell AWAL to Sony and join forces with Francisco Partners.

🕊️ Earlier this week, we said goodbye to ABBA guitarist, Lasse Wellander, and The Script guitarist, Mark Sheehan.

🎯 A few more quick hits: Jai Paul makes his live performance debut at Coachella, Doja Cat is done with pop music and confidently taking on the world of rap, Billy McFarland announces Fyre Festival 2 is coming (cringe), Halsey parts ways with Capitol Records, Timothée Chalamet is officially set to play Bob Dylan in an upcoming biopic (and plans to sing himself), Ed Sheeran surprises a subway singer with a duet, SZA beats a record previously held by Mary J. Blige as SOS goes double platinum, and if you want to work with Donald Glover, the time is now.

💳 Following up on our report from earlier this year, Mastercard offers up a free Mastercard Music pass NFT as part of its Artist Accelerator program. In the meantime, Universal Music Group doesn’t think those AI-powered videos of Drake singing a Kanye song are cool and is urging streaming companies to manage it.

🤖 Spotify is continuing to expand its research & development, from having a team of researchers building a machine learning model to its latest partnership with Strava. In addition, the streaming giant decides it’s done with the standalone app Spotify Live and decides to pivot as it explores new ways to connect artists and fans. Starting May 5th, you can take Heardle out of your daily mix of Wordle and NYT Crossword because Spotify is unfortunately cutting ties with that too.

🤠 Tim McGraw partners with Skydance to build entertainment media company Down Home, VBO joins the club of companies looking to provide an alternative to Ticketmaster, Nick Cannon joins Amazon Amp as a new radio host, and YouTube Music finally adds real-time lyrics.

🎧 Keep your ears open for new music drops this year: Bob Dylan is turning his 2021 concert film Shadow King into an album, Skrillex teases a third album drop, Four Tet is working on his 12th studio album, and Chris Brown alludes to an upcoming feature with Ciara.

Artist of the Week: Rina Sawayama 🎙️

We’re returning to the UK this week to cover a pop artist whose story hits closer to home. Like many first-generation Asian immigrants, Rina Sawayama shares a story of overcoming the numerous hardships attributed to the cultural differences of growing up in a Western country.

An Identity Crisis

Rina, who was originally born in Niigata, Japan, moved to England at the age of five after her father took on a new role with Japan Airlines. Although it was supposed to be a temporary stint, her parents realized that their daughter would benefit by staying in England, so the family decided to plant roots in London. Not long after, her father and mother would split, prompting her father to return to Japan, leaving Rina and her mother in London.

Although neither of Rina’s parents was musically inclined, Rina expressed interest in music at an early age by adopting her parents’ eclectic taste in J-pop music and committing herself to sing whenever she found the time (usually in the school choir or at karaoke). At the age of nine, Rina was formally introduced to Western music, which helped catalyze both her passion for music and her assimilation into British culture. As Rina grew into her teenage years, she gradually became more insecure about her cultural upbringing, frequently feeling embarrassed that her mother couldn’t speak native English or that bringing an ethnic lunch to school would result in shame. Even her mother’s Japanese heritage and intrusive attitude felt like they could box her into the generic Asian stereotype that she ultimately wanted to avoid. At times, Rina wanted to be white, and her family’s financial situation left her wanting to be more British as she had to share a room with her mother until the age of 15. Yet, her mother continued to support Rina’s music ambitions, even during her final years of secondary school when Rina joined a band called Lazy Lion. It’s a common platitude many Asian-American children have come to terms with–a realization that their parents made the challenging sacrifice of moving to a new country in hopes to create a better livelihood for their children.

Reclamation

After moving to Cambridge to study politics, psychology, and sociology at Magdalene College, Rina spent most of her collegiate years reclaiming her identity. During her final year of college, she befriended several people from the LGBTQ+ community who helped her reform her views on self-identity and sexuality. Drag became especially influential, giving her perspective on the relief and humor that drag brought to ease the past traumas experienced by the LGBTQ+ community. Rina realized that these same themes were important to leverage in her creative pursuits.

After college, Rina signed with Elite Model Management. In her first few years of modeling, she felt isolated due to the lack of diversity and the numerous microaggressions she had experienced during casting calls. However, she was inspired by casting director, James Scully, to speak out, taking to Instagram to describe how she was listed as an “Asian addition” to photo shoots. While Rina was praised for her brazenness, she continued to struggle financially to support her musical ambitions. She had to take multiple odd jobs, which included selling ice cream sandwiches, working as a nail tech, and even working at an Apple store (before being fired due to a modeling conflict of interest).

Never Too Late

Although Rina may have written her first song at the age of 17, she wasn’t able to fully commit to music until the age of 26, which she describes as “ancient for a pop artist.” Rina started as a part-time musician and was able to scrape together a limited budget to record her debut album in her bedroom. The surprisingly positive reception helped boost Rina’s music career and allowed her to further explore her inspirations of an against-the-grain pop sound hallmarked by the bubblegum and R&B pop from the Y2K era. To Rina, it was important to find the right collaborators that shared this vision. She eventually partnered with producer Clarence Clarity and signed her first album deal at the age of 29 with record label, Dirty Hit.

While artists like Madonna, Beyoncé, and Britney have been inspirations, her songwriting has derived from overcoming her identity and mental health hardships. Whether it’s pulling at the themes of an embittered coming-of-age from feeling marginalized or experiencing the sociopolitical microaggressions of being Asian during COVID, Rina has become an emboldened trailblazer for the Asian community abroad, and we at Sunlighter cosign her progressiveness. From speaking against the British Phonographic Industry and fighting for equal qualification for British music awards to being endorsed by artists like Elton John and Charli XCX who continue to support her reformative spirit, we think Rina will continue to ascend across her multidisciplinary creative career. At the end of the day, Rina just wants to make people happy.

Wrap Up 👏

We're closing the newsletter this week with an artist who rose to fame in 2018 and now has M’s in his bank like yes, indeed.

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

See ya next Sunday 😎

Chris and Donya