Joe Diffie’s ‘Pickup Man’ Goes to No. 1

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Twenty-eight years ago today, on Dec. 17, 1994, Joe Diffie received an early Christmas present: It was on that date that his single “Pickup Man,” from his Third Rock From the Sun album, landed at the top of the charts, where it stayed for four consecutive weeks.

Epic

“Pickup Man,” written by Howard Perdew and Kerry Kurt Phillips, defends a man’s penchant for his pickup truck with cleverly crafted lines such as, “You can set my truck on fire and roll it down a hill / And I still wouldn’t trade it for a Coupe de Ville / I got an eight-foot bed that never has to be made / You know, if it weren’t for trucks we wouldn’t have tailgates / I met all my wives in traffic jams / There’s just something women like about a pickup man.” The song was the second one from Third Rock From the Sun to reach No. 1; Diffie’s previous single, the album’s title track, also landed in the top spot.

Although Diffie notched five No. 1 hits throughout his illustrious career, “Pickup Man” remains his most successful to date, and his only song to stay at No. 1 for so long. The tunesmith included “Pickup Man” on his 1998 Greatest Hits album, as well as his 2002 16 Biggest Hits record and 2011’s Playlist: The Very Best of Joe Diffie.

This story was originally written by Gayle Thompson, and revised by Annie Zaleski. 

Well, I got my first truck when I was three / Drove a hundred thousand miles on my knees / Hauled marbles and rocks and thought twice before / I hauled a Barbie Doll bed for the girl next door / She tried to pay me with a kiss and I began to understand / There’s something women like about a pickup man

When I turned sixteen, I saved a few hundred bucks / My first car was a pickup truck / I was cruising the town and the first girl I seen / Was Bobbie Jo Gentry, the homecoming queen / She flagged me down and climbed up in the cab / And said, “I never knew you were a pickup man”

You can set my truck on fire and roll it down a hill / And I still wouldn’t trade it for a Coupe De Ville / I got an eight-foot bed that never has to be made / You know, if it weren’t for trucks we wouldn’t have tailgates / I met all my wives in traffic jams / There’s just something women like about a pickup man

Most Friday nights I can be found / In the bed of my truck on an old chaise lounge / Backed into my spot at the drive-in show / You know a cargo light gives off a romantic glow / I never have to wait in line at the popcorn stand / Cause there’s something women like about a pickup man

You can set my truck on fire and roll it down a hill / And I still wouldn’t trade it for a Coupe De Ville / I got an eight-foot bed that never has to be made / You know, if it weren’t for trucks we wouldn’t have tailgates / I met all my wives in traffic jams / There’s just something women like about a pickup man

A bucket of rust or a brand new machine / Once around the block and you’ll know what I mean

You can set my truck on fire and roll it down a hill / And I still wouldn’t trade it for a Coupe De Ville / I got an eight-foot bed that never has to be made / You know, if it weren’t for trucks we wouldn’t have tailgates / I met all my wives in traffic jams / There’s just something women like about a pickup man / Yeah, there’s something women like about a pickup man



December 17 – Dianña Releases Official Music Video For ‘Missing You Under The Mistletoe’

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Dianña (pronounced Dee-on-ya) is behind door number 17 of our Essential Advent Calendar, with the official music video for her festive single, ‘Missing You Under The Mistletoe’.

The song was produced and mixed by Mark Needham and recorded at Kent Wells Productions Studio in Nashville.

Produced and directed by Fon Davis of Fonco Studios in Los Angeles, the video features Dianña singing, with backing vocals by Kent Wells. She has a very familiar, and comforting tone, with an easy delivery style all her own.

Speaking of ‘Missing You Underneath The Mistletoe’, Dianña said,

I wrote the first draft of “Missing You Underneath the Mistletoe” over ten years ago but couldn’t seem to come up with a good ending. When I was thinking about writing a Christmas song last year it popped up in my drafts. The ending was kind of sad reflecting where I was in my life at the time. But things in my life have changed for the better and the new happy ending just flowed out naturally.

You can watch the video for ‘Missing You Under The Mistletoe’ below.

Dianña has found her true calling as a traditional country music singer/songwriter after having written, recorded and performed with many well-known R&B, rap, rock, pop, gospel, alternative, and country artists from Snoop Dogg to Amy Grant.  

Dianña’s debut Country single and music video, ‘Andale Yeehaw’ was released in late 2018.  She released two more original light-hearted singles in 2019; ‘Rubberneck’, about men’s tendencies when they see a pretty girl, and ‘You Got Some Nerve’, about online dating.

In 2020 she released the original country version of her novelty song, ‘Calm Down Karen’, which was played over 50 million times on TikTok.  The success of the country version led her to release a POP version in late 2021 ‘Calm Down Karen- Can I Speak to a Manager’ Remix, which reached #48 on the BDS/Billboard Top 40 POP Indicator chart.

Dianña’s newest release ‘Gonna Take a Real Strong Man’ is the first of several new songs she was inspired to write after wading through an old storage locker full of long-suppressed, often painful memories. It is a poignant look back at some of the events that have shaped her life, and the demons she still deals with today.

Find out more about Dianña and her music online on her official website, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Spotify, ‎Apple Music, and YouTube.



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YouTube Music may soon allow users to create custom radio within platform

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Google-owned music streaming platform YouTube Music will soon give users the ability to create a custom radio.

YouTube Music already lets users customise their current queue directly from the Now Playing screen by genre, familiarity, mood and energy level.

Now YouTube will soon give users the freedom to create a custom radio in an in-depth manner.

The tech company is currently testing the upcoming feature as a few YouTube Music users on Friday started seeing ‘Create a radio’ option in the main feed.
The feature, supposed to “tune your music”, shows a grid of artists for you to select from, which appears similar to YouTube Music’s initial setup process.

According to reports, after users have made their selections, YouTube Music will give them three “Song selection” options — Familiar, Blend, and Discover.

Similarly, ‘Filters’ will include — Popular, Deep cuts, New releases, Pump-up, Chill, Upbeat, Downbeat, and Focus, according to the report.

In July, YouTube Music tested a new feature — Dynamic queue, which helped get queue and radio updates based on users listening behaviour.

YouTube Music will change the playback queue if users skip to a new track while still halfway through the current song.

Moreover, in June, YouTube Music’s web app added a new feature that allowed users to manage songs in bulk more easily, particularly when adding them to specific playlists.

As per reports, YouTube plans to make the feature available in the coming weeks across the world as this will add advanced level of customisation compared to what YouTube Music and algorithm offers naturally.

How classical music said thank you to the Queen in 2022

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In classical music, as in all the arts, 2022 was supposed to be a new dawn, a joyous surging back to life after the dismalness of two lockdown years. In the event, it was – but only up to a point. 

Numerous events were curtailed or hampered because of illness, and the Proms lost two headline artists, Jonas Kaufmann and Freddie De Tommaso, to bouts of Covid. And the return of audiences to live events has been tentative. Only for the biggest names have venues been able to fill every seat, and most orchestras report audiences are still about 15 per cent down on pre-pandemic figures. 

Brexit continues to exert a huge drag, imposing maddening bureaucratic delays and costs on anyone who wants to travel to the EU to perform – and vice versa. The ­Russian invasion of Ukraine was another blow, as organisations rushed to disinvite Russian soloists, give back tainted Russian money, and cancel concerts with Russian music (though there was also an upside, in the rush to programme fine Ukrainian composers we’d never heard of).

These headwinds were expected. What was not expected, and came as a nasty shock, was the sharp dec­line in listeners to the BBC’s classical music station, Radio 3, which lost one in six of its listeners in the third quarter of 2022. Commercial stations Classic FM and Scala Radio were also sharply down, by 6.5 per cent and 9.5 per cent respectively. There was much anxious speculation that just as listeners were losing the habit of going to concerts, they were also losing the habit of turning on the radio, as well.

Underneath the temporary choppy seas of rising costs and falling revenues run deeper, less vis­ible currents of social and cultural change, to which musicians and organisations must adapt. Classic FM now offers playlists organised by “mood”. In a nod to younger listeners’ preference for spiritually “immersive” music, Radio 3, once the home of strenuous high-mindedness, has invited Icelandic musician Ólafur Arnalds to curate his own series, Ultimate Calm, which explores “how classical, contemporary and ambient music can soothe the soul”. The fact that some musicians still talk in terms of musical experience as a effortful “going on a journey”, whereas others now see it as a lucid, thoroughly wide-awake process of following the unfolding logic of a piece, shows that there are competing visions of what classical music is or should be.

Anna Fišere – Radices (World Première)

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One of the more memorable works performed at the inaugural Baltic Music Days in 2020 was Mundus Invisibilis by Latvian composer Anna Fišere (formerly Ķirse). That piece was concerned with fungal mycelium, and her earlier work Radices for 8 singers and electronics, composed in 2018, is similarly rooted in the growth of natural forms. Literally: the title translates as “roots”, and in addition to this the only other words used in the piece are “truncus” (trunk), “rami” (branches) and “folia” (leaves). Fišere’s inspiration came from the book The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, and in fact Radices is an introduction to a much more ambitious work, Tree Opera. Windthrows, that was apparently premièred in the woods of northern Finland in mid-2019.

What i find so intoxicating about Radices is the way it can be heard as entirely naturalistic, and as such nothing whatever to do with humanity, or ritualistic, an elaborate human act of perhaps reverence and homage to the natural world. The words emerge as broken phonemes, articulated in a variety of ways, both energised and gentle; the electronics provide both the environment and its atmosphere, including tolling gongs and a layer of buzzing shimmer. Those gongs enhance the ritual aspect, as do the way the lower voices intone their words earlier on. The naturalistic perception comes from the way it seems we are listening in on a diverse, private nocturnal chorus from the natural world: weird, heightened noises that one imagines could be the greatly magnified, otherwise inaudible, sounds of plant life.

The voices by turns gibber, wail, moan, shout and, in the work’s central section, sing, unleashing a beautiful chord, rich and intense. It’s that same intensity that causes the chord to be unsustainable, breaking apart as individual notes protrude with more force, fracturing the homogeneity. It leads to a climactic sequence where the singers erupt in a loud torrent of alien vocal tics and word fragments, a huge release of energy that just as suddenly vanishes, concluding as whistles while the electronics softly die away as wind.

The world première of Radices was performed by the Latvian Radio choir conducted by Kaspars Putniņš, with Anna Fišere herself on electronics.

The Top-Selling Digital Country Songs of 2022 Revealed

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Walker Hayes is holding down the top two spots on Billboard‘s year-end Country Digital Songs chart. His working-class anthem-turned-unstoppable-juggernaut, “Fancy Like,” is the top-selling song of 2022. Following close behind is “AA,” its equally hooky follow-up single, whose No. 2 spot on the chart proves once and for all that “Fancy Like” was no fluke.

Hayes was undeniably among the biggest breakouts from the country format this year, but he’s not the only newer artist to claim a top spot on the 2022 year-end charts. Cody Johnson comes in at No. 3 with “‘Til You Can’t,” a song that achieved both commercial success and critical acclaim, even bringing him a 2023 Grammy Best Country Song nomination to close out the year.

More of 2022’s biggest hits claim the bulk of the rest of the Top 10, though there is one older song on the list. That’s Chris Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey,” which comes in at No. 8. The song launched Stapleton to superstardom in 2015 and has demonstrated astonishing staying power, holding a place on a year-end chart a full seven years after its initial release.

Billboard‘s list of Top 10 Country Airplay hits from 2022 includes very few female artists, and the year-end Digital Songs chart is even bleaker: No women hold a space in the Top 10, not even as a guest performer on a song. The only female-fronted songs to make it into the Top 25 are Taylor Swift’s Taylor’s Version of “All Too Well” and Miranda Lambert and Elle King’s “Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home),” coming in at No. 13 and No. 16, respectively.

Additionally, Carrie Underwood gets a mention as the featured artist on the Jason Aldean-led “If I Didn’t Love You” (No. 19), and Lainey Wilson shows up twice: Once for “Wait in the Truck,” her duet with Hardy (No. 24) and “Never Say Never,” her duet with Cole Swindell (No. 25).

On this year-end chart, Swindell fares better alone: His “She Had Me at Heads Carolina,” his reinterpretation of Jo Dee Messina’s ’90s classic, “Heads Carolina, Tails California,” comes in at No. 6. Jordan Davis claims the No. 5 spot with “Buy Dirt,” his Luke Bryan duet, and Luke Combs slides into the ninth place with “The Kind of Love We Make.”

Meanwhile, Morgan Wallen makes up for a comparatively modest showing on the year-end chart for radio airplay, occupying more spots in the Top 10 of the year-end Digital Songs chart than any other artist. “You Proof” earns the No. 4 spot, with “Wasted on You” following at No. 5; “Sand in My Boots” marks his third entry inside the year-end Top 10, coming in tenth place.

Scroll down to see the Top 10 songs on the 2022 year-end list for the Billboard Country Digital Songs chart.

Top 10 Highest-Selling Country Digital Songs Chart, per Billboard:

10. “Sand in My Boots,” Morgan Wallen
9. “The Kind of Love We Make,” Luke Combs
8. “Tennessee Whiskey,” Chris Stapleton
7. “Buy Dirt,” Jordan Davis feat. Luke Bryan
6. “She Had Me at Heads Carolina,” Cole Swindell
5. “Wasted on You,” Morgan Wallen
4. “You Proof,” Morgan Wallen
3. “‘Til You Can’t,” Cody Johnson
2. “AA,” Walker Hayes
1. “Fancy Like,” Walker Hayes

Top 22 Country Songs of 2022, Ranked

There are plenty of feel-good country jams on this list of the top country songs of 2022, but the No. 1 song is one of the best love songs of the decade. These 22 songs are ranked by critical acclaim, radio and sales success, and importance to the genre.
Seven of the 22 artists made our Top Country Songs list from 2021, as well, but there are no song repeats. If a song made a previous list (or didn’t spend most of its time on the charts in 2022), it’s not eligible. So, before you ask where your favorite song is (i.e. Cody Johnson, “‘Til You Can’t”), be sure the miss isn’t just a technicality.



Synthesizers & Strings: New Music from Francesca Guccione

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Asheville, NC, December 15, 2022 — Utopia Aerial View, a new four-piece album by composer and violinist Francesca Guccione, invites listeners to experience the distinctive relationship between electronic and organic sound.

In each composition, the artist brings together violin and an assortment of analog synthesizers. This marriage of compelling, cinematic strings and delicate modular soundscapes presents electronic musical instruments as expressive, adaptable tools for contemporary classical musicians.

 

 

The development of Utopia Aerial View began with an original arrangement for synth and violin that Francesca performed at this year’s Superbooth Berlin event. Drawing inspiration from film themes and visuals, physical surroundings, and the instruments at hand, the composer let her imagination flow freely to craft the rest of the album, she tells Moog Music.

“The music is characterized mainly by dialogue between the violin and Moog synthesizers, especially the Grandmother, DFAM, and Subharmonicon,” she shares. “I think Moog’s synthesizers, with their warm and unique sound, are perfect for playing with strings.”

The artist demonstrates the sound and character of these instruments in an emotive performance of “Utopia I,” the opening track on Utopia Aerial View. Watch the performance and read more about her creative process here.

 

 

Composer Francesca Guccione on the Connection between Strings & Synthesizers

In communication with Moog Music about her new album, Francesca Guccione discusses the role of semi-modular synthesizers in neoclassical music:

“As a fan of small ensembles and chamber music, it was a fun and exciting challenge for me to translate that kind of writing for instruments that are generally associated with other genres of music. Thus, for example, the Subharmonicon reiterates bichords from where the entire structure of a track unfolds, thus imitating what two cellos would do, or the Grandmother performs minimalist cells that, intertwined with the melodic line of the violin, makes it possible to create an intense dialogue and exchange of voices between the various instruments.” 

See and hear more from the artist on Moog’s website.

Utopia Aerial View by Francesca Guccione is now available to stream or purchase. To listen to the EP, visit Spotify or Bandcamp.

 

 

More about Francesa Guccione

Source: Francesca Guccione 

Francesca Guccione is an Italian composer and violinist.

Fascinated from the very beginning by the relation between sound and image, she combined her violin studies with those in composition and film scoring, earning a Master’s Degree in this discipline with the highest grades.

Her love for travelling and her need to always discover and learn about new realities lead her to perform in many cities around the world, including New York, Toronto, Dublin and Alexandria of Egypt.

In 2021 she released for Whales Records her first album of neoclassical music, “Muqataea”, featuring cellist and composer Giovanni Sollima as the project’s artistic director; afterwards, several international artists, including Robot Koch, Julien Marchal, Hélène Vogelsinger, and Throwing Snow will make and release reworks of some of the tracks on this album. In addition to Whales Records, she also collaborates with other record labels, including Little Symphony Records, InFiné Music, and 7K! Records with which she released in 2022 the single “Mare Tranquillitatis” included in the collection “String Layers Vol. II”.

On invitation from Moog Music she performed at Superbooth 22 in Berlin where she presented an original composition for violin and synths.

Her creativity is poetic and suspended between reality and imagination; a gateway to hidden worlds.

​More about Moog Music
​Moog Music is the world’s leading producer of theremins and analog synthesizers. The employee-owned company and its customers carry on the legacy of its founder, electronic musical instrument pioneer Dr. Bob Moog. All of Moog’s instruments are assembled by hand in its factory in downtown Asheville, North Carolina. Learn more here.

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2022 Biggest Hits Mashed-Up In 4-Minute Banger By DJ Earworm

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How does one make sense of every single pop music hit from 2022 in less than 4 minutes? Mash-ups baby! California’s DJ Earworm has been presenting his “United State of Pop” mash-ups every year for quite some time, and now the 2022 “United State Of Pop (I Want Music)” has arrived.

Pretty much guaranteed that you won’t hear Steve Lacy‘s “Bad Habit” woven in and out of Beyonce’s “Break My Soul” and Harry Styles’ “As It Was” quite like this. The mix feels like one big walk of shame…err..triumph, through the year in pop and you can hear it above. Meanwhile, checkout the listing of the 25 tracks that appear on DJ Earworm’s “United State Of Pop (I Want Music)” in alphabetical order below.

Bad Bunny – “Tití Me Preguntó”
Bad Bunny and Chencho Corleone – “Me Porto Bonito”
Beyoncé – “Break My Soul”
Cast of Encanto – “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”
Doja Cat – “Woman”
Elton John and Dua Lipa – “Cold Heart (Pnau Remix)”
Future – “Wait for U (feat. Drake & Tems)”
Gayle – “Abcdefu”
Harry Styles – “As It Was”
Harry Styles – “Late Night Talking”
Imagine Dragons – “Enemy (feat. JID & League of Legends)”
Jack Harlow – “First Class”
Justin Bieber -” Ghost”
Kate Bush – “Running Up That Hill”
Kodak Black – “Super Gremlin”
Latto – “Big Energy”
Lil Nas X – “Thats What I Want”
Lizzo – “About Damn Time”
Morgan Wallen – “You Proof”
Nicky Youre and Dazy – “Sunroof”
OneRepublic – “I Ain’t Worried”
Post Malone and Doja Cat – “I Like You (A Happier Song)”
Sam Smith and Kim Petras – “Unholy”
Steve Lacy – “Bad Habit”
Taylor Swift – “Anti-Hero”

Chymes shares new song, “I Think I Made You Up” – Aipate

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Australian pop sensation Chymes delivered a new anthem last week. She named the song “I Think I Made You Up”.

It’s a buoyant break-up song.

Chymes says: “When you break up finally realise that they actually suck, you play this song. ‘I Think I Made You Up’ is about the moment you figure out that this person you were with wasn’t actually perfect and you made it all up in your head. Sometimes it’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking the person we’re dating is so amazing and great and everything you ever wanted but you’re actually just ignoring all the bad shit and trying so hard to just focus on the good. ITIMYU is fun and laid back, not overly serious, just a moment to laugh at yourself for being dumb and being glad you broke it off because, well, they suck lol.“

Listen/dance to “I Think I Made You Up” and follow Chymes on Instagram.