Brett CallwoodFrom Megan Thee Stallion to Thom Yorke: The ninety-seventh LA Weekly playlist, reviewing the musicians that we’ve been writing about all week, is live now. There’s electronic music from Crystal Skies and Alison Wonderland, hip-hop from Megan Thee Stallion, alt-rock from Thom Yorke and the Long Beach Dub Allstars, and so much more.
Find us on Spotify here,
Don’t forget to “Like” the playlists and “Follow” the profiles.
Alison Wonderland (Simply G)
From Megan Thee Stallion to Thom Yorke
Also this week:
Cover star Alison Wonderland told us that,
“It’s the age-old thing – there’s so many years of hard work before anyone sees anything. A really pivotal moment for me was when “I Want U” got noticed in 2014. It reached number one on Hype Machine, and then all of a sudden I had done a Diplo & Friends [radio show]. That got me some attention, and then the momentum just happened. Really quickly, people were starting to get me. I had not felt like that before, so I took advantage of that and wrote after the first EP an album called Run.”
“I wasn’t really attracted to the scene when I first got out of school, because I was playing cello,” she added. “I was a classical cellist and I was over in Europe, and I was more gravitating toward punk and stuff like that. I would go around Europe watching small punk bands play, and then go back and play my cello at the school. It was very weird, because I was completely on my own in that time, but I had crazy experiences and discovered a lot of amazing things about myself. Mainly that it’s OK not to be cool in high school, because when you get out of it, nobody really cares. So it was around the time that I started producing – it was pretty instant for me. I was playing in a punk band in Sydney, and I was also a door girl at the club. Garth Crane, my best friend and manager, said ‘Why don’t you do the closing DJ sets?’ He gave me a DJ lesson, and then I became hyper-focused on it.”
In “Not Another DJ,” the Crystal Skies guys said, “The most difficult part of the pandemic, from a music perspective, was maintaining motivation to continue to make music even though we didn’t have much opportunity to play live shows. I think a lot of artists shared this feeling, as shows are often a big motivating factor to continue to put out new music. That said, working on our album helped give us a target to aim at, and helped propel us through a difficult time. Without the same level of traveling, we did have more time to work on music in general, and so there were probably some benefits to it as well. Overall it’s not a time I would really want to repeat, but I would like to think we made the most of what we had.”
Advertising disclosure: We may receive compensation for some of the links in our stories. Thank you for supporting LA Weekly and our advertisers.