New Music Friday: 3/7/25

Here are the rules: I listen to all 100 tracks of Spotify's New Music Friday playlist, except for anything that rhymes the n-word with itself more than three times, any screamo or screamo-adjacent stuff, any CCM that reveals its true intentions in time for me to hit the skip button, and any egregiously corny modern country music, typically performed by a dude with two first names. Having sifted through this week's playlist, here's what I actively enjoyed:

"Swing for the Fences," Elton John and Brandi Carlile
I'm very surprised to find myself including this here, because it's been a really long time since I heard any new Elton or Elton-affiliated music that did a damn thing for me. I think the last time I ran toward one of his footballs was when he released his collaborative project with Leon Russell, an album decidedly less than the sum of its parts; when I read that he'd cut a record with Brandi Carlile, I figured it'd just be another dozen dollops of the same progressively weaker sauce he's been doling out for decades.

The album itself may end up to be a dud — and I was bored to death by the previous pre-release track, so I suppose the odds of that happening are rather high — but this is the most enjoyable song I can remember hearing from Grandma Elton, and it's an uptempo number to boot. I don't know if it's wise to be cautiously optimistic about anything in 2025, but...