Melissa Kacar

"Scared of Loving You" by Selena Gomez & Benny Blanco Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco , her fiancé and the producer of some of the most iconic pop songs of the past 15+ years, announced a brand-new collaborative album titled I Said I Love You First   that is set to be released in March! The album is going to chronicle their entire love story, starting with the first song released from their project titled "Scared of Loving You". It is a simple and sweet ballad about wanting to finally fall in love again but fearing that the past may repeat itself. It was also co-written and co-produced by Finneas , who is another one of my favorite artists ever and takes the song to a whole new level. Just last month in my anniversary review of Selena's 2020 album Rare , I wrote that as much as I would love for her to come back and make more music again, I assumed she would be taking a long hiatus from it because of how vocal she's been about wanting to focus more on act...

"party 4 u" by Charli xcx is a euphoric anthem of unrequited love, a song full of glittering synths and raw emotion. She sings about throwing an entire party with the hopes that just the one person she wants to see the most will be there - a very Gatsby theme that she translated so well into this song. It is featured on her 2020 album how i'm feeling now , which was largely created in isolation and released in the thick of the pandemic in May of that year. She worked with her frequent collaborator, A.G. Cook , on this song and the rest of the album. By the time the pandemic started, they only had about half of the album finished, so they decided to go with a DIY approach while finishing the rest of how i'm feeling now .  "party 4 u" had a much longer history by that point though, as Charli said in an interview with Apple Music. "This is the oldest song on the album. For myself and A. G., this song has so much life and story," Charli said. "We...

Following the release of her Grammy winning album   Short n' Sweet last summer, Sabrina Carpenter is giving us a taste of something even sweeter - five new deluxe tracks! Every single song on the standard edition of  Short n' Sweet   is pure pop perfection, the deluxe tracks only further enhance the original album. Of course, all five additions also carry through so much of Sabrina's signature charm and humor that is very present throughout all of the music she makes.  Across these five songs, she worked with all of the same collaborators as the rest of the standard edition, Amy Allen , Julian Bunetta, John Ryan, and Jack Antonoff . Short n' Sweet  was one of my favorite albums of 2024 and I've been continuously obsessed with every single song on it since it was released.  "15 Minutes" is the first of five new songs on the deluxe edition of the album, which gives the listener a glimpse into her life following the release of Short n' Sweet   and the...

"A&W" is one of the greatest songs Lana Del Rey has ever written. It was featured as the fourth track of her incredible 2023 album Did You Know That There's A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd , which overall is an intimate and diaristic portrait of her life thus far. When talking about the process of writing the album in 2022, she told W Magazine , "I've been practicing meditative automatic singing, where I don’t filter anything. I'll just sing whatever comes to mind into my Voice Notes app. It's not perfect, obviously," she said. "For this new music ... It's more just like: I'm angry. The songs are very conversational ... It's a very wordy album. ... It's almost like I'm typing in my mind." That method is present throughout the entire album, many of the songs are long and often with heavy subject matter at hand, in which she doesn't hold back at all. There is a lot of symbolism and depth in every single track. "A...

Lover: Live From Paris  was recorded in September of 2019 at Olympia Theater in Paris, France - which stands as Taylor Swift 's only full-length concert performance of this album at the time it was released. What a more fitting place than in the City of Love! Lover , which was written as a love letter to love itself, represented a fresh start and the first page in a new chapter of her career. The recording of the performance was released in May 2020 as a Disney+ special called  Taylor Swift: City of Lover , along with the live album on streaming platforms. Only eight of the songs she performed that night are on this album, which excludes every other song she sang from her other albums at the show.  It is such an incredible performance, some of the live versions from this album I actually prefer to the original studio versions. The live version of "Death By A Thousand Cuts" in particular is an all-time career highlight, there is just so much passion and emotion in her...