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This week in the best new pop music saw some big-name collaborations and strong singles from up-and-comers. Bebe Rexha returned with a Doja Cat collaboration, Victoria Monet tapped Kehlani for a sultry single, and Little Mix shared a sugary-sweet tune.

Each week, Uproxx rounds up the best new pop music. Listen up.

Bebe Rexha — “Baby I’m Jealous” Feat. Doja Cat

After weeks of teasing, Bebe and Doja’s energetic “Baby I’m Jealous” single is finally here to get Uproxx’s best new pop stamp of approval. “‘Baby, I’m Jealous’ is a song I wrote about embracing my insecurities,” Bebe said about the track. “It’s about the way social media has heightened my jealousy which can affect how I feel about myself. We are constantly flooded with the highlights of other people’s lives, and at times I find myself comparing my worth and beauty to others. It’s part of the human process to experience jealousy—ultimately, this is an anthem to embrace those feelings as a form of empowerment.”

Victoria Monet — “Touch Me” Feat. Kehlani

Following the release of her shimmering album Jaguar, Victoria Monet called on Kehlani to lend a verse on her queer anthem “Touch Me.” “This song is a very personal one,” Monet said. “As artists, it’s special when we let the music document the details of real experiences and that’s what ‘Touch Me’ does. I think it’s beautiful for so many reasons and I hope people can find their own reasons with every listen.”

Little Mix — “Not A Pop Song”

Pop group Little Mix returned with another hit this week. Following their previous singles “Holiday” and “Break Up Song,” the group’s exuberant “Not A Pop Song” will be featured in their upcoming sixth studio album Confetti.

Alexander 23 — “Brainstorm”

Alexander 23 wants his fans to know that it’s okay to not be okay. Released for Global Mental Health Day, “Brainstorm” is a rolling piano anthem that aims to break the stigma surrounding mental health conversations.

Channel Tres — “Skate Depot”

Channel Tres’ “Skate Depot” arrives this week as his first single off of his upcoming I Can’t Go Outside mixtape. Offering his musings over a club-ready beat, the single is an ode to the late Skate Depot rink in Cerritos, CA. The rink was the musician’s first job, but he was let go just week weeks later for not being “good enough” at skating.

Gia Woods — “All I Know”

Gia Woods had already made a name for herself in alt-pop with a handful of singles but this week, the singer offered her debut EP Cut Season. On the project, “All I Know” stands out as a earnest reflection on finding deeper love and self acceptance after cutting out toxic friends.

Daya — “First Time”

After spending the majority of 2020 working on new music, Grammy Award-winning singer Daya is here to impress with her latest single “First Time.” Over a rhythmic beat, Daya delivers a lighthearted tune about memorable night. “‘First Time’ was a natural result of being more in touch with myself and the world around me, knowing exactly what I want and how to get there. It feels like a rebirth of self – sonically and visually – and it’s a small piece of an entire world I’m building,” Daya said about the revved-up track.

Sasha Sloan — “Hypochondriac”

Sasha Sloan continued to tease her upcoming debut album, Only Child, this week with the gentle ballad “Hypochondriac.” The fourth single released off her impending effort, the song showcases the singer’s powerhouse vocals while she sings of finally prioritizing her health now that she’s in love.

Labrinth — “No Ordinary”

After releasing an album and scoring the entirety of HBO’s hit show Euphoria, Grammy-nominated musician Labrinth returns with “No Ordinary.” Released as part of the all-new Xbox campaign, Power Your Dreams, “No Ordinary” features lulling melodies over Labrinth’s soaring voice.

Prep — “Carrie”

With “Carrie,” Prep share a final preview of their eccentric sound ahead of their debut album. “The song is pretending to be a lot happier than it is. It makes me think of someone sitting down a bit drunk at a pub piano, trying to turn all the shit they’re going through into a hazy singalong,” Prep said in a statement.

Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The NBA got some troubling news this week about its viewership, with TV ratings for Finals hitting historic lows. In fact, Games 2 and 3 were literally the least-watched Finals games of all time, according to Sports Media Watch. For the people whose job is to bring eyes to the product, those numbers are alarming in any context. But there’s also plenty of noise surrounding them that can be spun to fit whatever narrative you want to endorse, no matter how flimsy or politically-motivated.

Take, for example, United States Senator Ted Cruz’s recent Twitter spat with Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Cruz wasted little time before piggybacking on an anti-Black Lives Matter sentiment and propagating the claim that the recent ratings dip is a result of the league’s emphasis on social justice.

Of course, it’s difficult to definitively prove a direct correlation between the league’s support for social justice measures and its declining viewing figures. Even though a recent Harris Poll showed that 38 percent of respondents said they stopped watching the NBA because it was becoming “too political,” it didn’t take into account that there is a major gap between the percentage of democrats who watch the NBA versus the percentage of republicans, nor did it define what was meant by “political.”

It also doesn’t account for all of the other factors that could be stealing eyes away from the playoffs, including the adjusted schedule extending deep into the fall season where it is competing with Sunday Night Football, the MLB playoffs, and a surge of cable news viewership that has been holding steady during the pandemic and election season. According to some experts, it’s difficult to try to read anything into these numbers. Via Variety:

“There is no proper context to compare the current NBA viewership post-COVID to any regular season,” says Tom McGovern, president of Omnicom Group’s sports media division Optimum Sports. “You’ve got an increased number of broadcast windows and start times that are an anomaly for this current season. The number of windows alone is going to dilute your average rating, you’ll have no West Coast prime time.”

Add to that the NBA’s ratings actually saw a spike during the restart when compared to before the shutdown, and the conclusions become even murkier. Then there’s the issue of logistics and the actual basketball product projected onto our screens. Never before has an entire NBA postseason played out in a single location without fans in attendance, and it is a starkly different viewing experience from the sheer electricity inside an NBA arena during a playoff game in front of a delirious home crowd. Players feed off that energy, and its absence looms large.

Yet, recent polls don’t clarify whether the lack of fans inside the arena in Orlando is actually a culprit in the ratings drop, although a separate poll suggests that at least some fans may question the validity of this year’s NBA title, given its unique circumstances. According to Lines.com, nearly one in five respondents (18.9 percent) said that they won’t consider this year’s NBA Finals completely valid. Of that number, less than 20 percent said it was because of social justice-related reasons, while a plurality (35.8 percent) pointed to the shortened season as its lack of validity. Of those questioning the validity, more than 27 percent said it’s because of the lack of home-court advantage, although that doesn’t tell us whether it’s caused viewers to tune out.

Given all these circumstances, the ratings dip has to be framed in its proper context: there’s simply too many factors involved to state definitively what’s behind that drop, whether it will persist into next season, and what the league and it’s TV partners must do to adapt to a changing TV viewership landscape. Viewed from an entirely different angle, the Bubble has been an astonishing feat of ingenuity. Considering the logistical challenges involved in a such a gigantic and unprecedented undertaking, there’s a million reasons why it should’ve failed, while the production folks have done an admirable job of recreating a serviceable approximation of that experience using artificial crowd noise, virtual fans, and other elements that help maintain the illusion of normalcy.

From a health and safety perspective, it’s been an unmitigated success. No one under the NBA umbrella — players, coaches, team personnel, etc. — tested positive while in the Bubble and, aside from a few breaks of protocol, things went about as smoothly as anyone could’ve hoped for. There was justified skepticism about whether any of this would work. Many feared that players would opt-out en masse because of concerns about the pandemic, or that a significant collection would stay home and fight for social justice and racial equality. Yet, when it came down to it, the vast majority decided to join their teams in Orlando, and since the games got underway back in July, the quality of the play has exceeded every expectation.

There have been thrilling highs and painful lows in the Bubble, all of which have made for captivating action. We’ve seen the Phoenix Suns’ perfect run through the seeding games; the Nuggets overcoming two straight 3-1 deficits in the playoffs; the Clippers’ stunning collapse; buzzer-beating game-winners from Devin Booker, Luka Doncic, and Anthony Davis; the Bucks’ collapse; Tyler Herro’s Billy Idol sneer; Jamal Murray’s layup package; Damian Lillard’s 40-foot bombs; an electrifying play-in game between the Blazers and the up-and-coming Grizzlies; Jimmy Butler’s ultimate vindication; LeBron James and Anthony Davis’ coronation; and about a hundred other things that would take too long to mention. In short, the NBA has been as good as ever in Orlando, and the playoffs have had no shortage of the typical intensity despite a fanless atmosphere that lacks the buzz of a postseason arena.

Back in March, the league acted swiftly in the immediate aftermath of Rudy Gobert’s positive COVID-19 test, quickly putting the season on hiatus and prompting the rest of the sports world — and, generally, the entire country — to start taking the situation more seriously. Seven months later, we have managed to crown the Lakers as the 2020 NBA champion, an outcome that was almost unimaginable in the early days of the pandemic.

The fact that they were able to pull this off without any major catastrophes along the way is remarkable in itself. Beyond that, it’s helped set the stage for what could be permanent changes to the NBA calendar going forward. It’s unlikely that we’ll see another Bubble scenario next season, as Silver and the board of governors are adamant about getting fans back in arenas once it is safe to do so, but it’s nearly impossible to see the experiment in Orlando as anything other than a major success, as it’s kept the NBA afloat during one of the darkest and most uncertain periods in league history.

To be fair, it would be irresponsible to ignore or brush aside the ratings issue, especially in a Finals series that features its biggest star in LeBron James, something that has caused Silver to raise his eyebrows. But much of the discourse surrounding also has to be taken for what it is: an effort to draw flimsy connections to undersell what the league has accomplished during the restart and point to political motivations that are difficult to quantify.

Ethan Hawke isn’t a flashy actor, for the most part. Nor is he an actor who, other than his work, attracts attention to himself. He simply, you know, works, which might be part of why (despite four Academy nominations, and being arguably robbed for another with 2018’s First Reformed) he’s never won an Oscar. He doesn’t play the awards game in a traditional sense, and in fact, he previously deconstructed the game while admitting to admiring Patti Smith for saying that she wanted every damn award and staying pretty casual on the subject himself. His almost zen approach is as interesting as watching super-successful award campaigns go down, and I have a hunch that we’ll be able to observe what he does following an Emmy nod next year.

Hawke burns so brightly that he’s incandescent in The Good Lord Bird, and it’s thrilling to see him command the small screen in a different way than he’s pulled off in cinemas. The limited series premiered on October 4, so you’re not too far behind if you missed the debut, but you really ought to catch up now. It’s a show that is best savored one episode at a time, so binging it later may not be as much of a good time.

As the fire-spewing abolitionist John Brown, Hawke delivers a showy and forceful performance that cannot be downplayed. It’s an unusually brash turn from him, after he’s played so many different vibes already, from his desk-standing moves in Dead Poets Society to a stream of slacker characters and romantic leads. Lately, his role choices have grown increasingly more diverse, including characters afflicted with inner turmoil and the occasional weirdo who shreds scenery. And then there’s a phase that I found especially interesting: The Purge and Sinister. In those horror movies, Hawke could, you know, lose his sh*t onscreen while playing two very different fatherly roles. He’s so adept at taking his audience along with them, that they, too, lose their sh*t. It’s a blast to watch people lose their sh*t and share in the communal sh*t-losing experience.

Hawke loved making those horror movies, too. As weird as it sounds, years later, I really feel like those films were a precursor to Hawke losing his sh*t in an altogether different way in The Good Lord Bird. He does so extravagantly, and like I noted already, this series is still young. I don’t want to spoil the experience for you by revealing too much. But it’s a wonderfully bizarre show. It realizes the ridiculousness of Hawke’s character, who remains a controversial figure of U.S. history, but it also celebrates his spirit. It’s a precarious balance to attempt, but the show (along with Hawke) pulls it off, somehow with humor, much like James McBride’s novel of the same name.

We so rarely get to see Hawke let loose like this, and he’s not only a hired gun, so to speak, but he helped make this project happen. He executive produced and co-wrote the scripts, which follow the perspective of a (fictional) teenage male slave, Henry (Joshua Caleb Johnson); John picks him up in pre-Civil War Kansas while mistaking him for a girl and affectionately dubbing him as “Onion.” He bears witness to John’s ragtag army while wielding weapons and wearing cumbersome antebellum attire, which adds to the show’s absurdity. It’s Onion who considers the white-savior factor of Brown’s threadbare plans. Yet as McBride stated of his book, this is not the story of the white savior as typically presented. Instead, “it’s the African-American perspective on the white savior that comes to save us, and that’s why it’s so funny. It’s a story of caricature.”

Hawke hurls himself into that caricature, one of a man who believes that he’s truly possessed by the spirit of God, and it’s a trip.

The thing is, Brown might be a bit of a homicidal maniac who’s prone to shoot any white man who won’t renounce slavery. He’s also got very little in the way of a plan, but that’s no shocker, since we see his ultimate fate at the beginning of the Good Lord Bird. Still, it’s a rip-roaring ride to watch Brown tearing across the country, including the 1859 Army depot raid at Harpers Ferry. He’d hoped to incite an armed slave revolt, thereby sending the institution of slavery down the toilet. The raid didn’t turn out so well for him, but it did contribute to enough of a divided North and South to help spark the Civil War.

What’s also fascinating is how Hawke originally envisioned Jeff Bridges as Brown, which would have brought some Dude-like swagger for sure, but I prefer Hawke’s take. There are moments when he’s bellowing with spittle flying onto his beard, his entire body shaking. Hawke has so much fun leaning into both the insane and heroic aspects of his character, and above all, his sincerity. John fervently insisted upon fueling the cause of ending slavery, even if his showiness and enormously flawed strategy is what ultimately took him down. That Hawke can manage to treat such a serious subject with both humanity and humor is awe-inspiring. Another highlight would be Brown’s flashy interactions with Frederick Douglass (Daveed Diggs), who brings his own self-assured presence while urging John to be a careful negotiator. Douglass, too, is portrayed as dabbling in his own brand of excess. This scene reflects quite a dinner party, by the way.

For decades, Hawke has remained one of his generation’s finest actors and achieved longevity after many of his peers (to borrow Neil Young’s lyrics) have burned out or faded away. And yes, The Good Lord Bird, on its face, might look heavy, but the truth is that it’s therapeutically funny stuff. Ethan Hawke rarely gets to provoke laughs like this except in flashes. I recall giggling at how jackass-y his Reality Bites character was, for example, and I’ve already mentioned the scenery-chewing of Stockholm, although that film didn’t receive much of a box-office run. However, Hawke being uproariously, darkly funny is available now on the small screen, and the world would be as much of a periodic fool as John Brown to pass it up.

Showtime’s ‘The Good Lord Bird’ airs on Sunday nights at 9:00pm EST.

If you thought that Trump’s “ROID RAGE” and his spat with the Lincoln Project would be the height of Trump shenanigans in about one week, you were sadly mistaken. The president, while coming down from the high of shaking his butt at a Florida rally, decided to take a swing at Dr. Anthony Fauci. The timing here is particularly interesting because Fauci has been forced to invest face time in publicly requesting that Trump remove an ad that quotes him out of context (all for the purpose of making it look like Fauci praised Trump’s (botching of his) pandemic response.

Well, Trump hasn’t backed down from using Fauci’s words for his own purposes, context or not, and he also decided to shred the NIAID director while springboarding off his not-spectacular baseball pitch (hey, no one can be fantastic at everything). Trump also added several made-up claims about how “Trump was right” and saved millions of lives.

“Actually, Tony’s pitching arm is far more accurate than his prognostications,” Trump tweeted. “‘No problem, no masks’. WHO no longer likes Lockdowns – just came out against. Trump was right. We saved 2,000,000 USA lives!!!”

As of right now, he’s getting ratio-d on the comments versus retweets, which are sitting at 13,000+ and 12,500+, respectively. As one can imagine, the most-liked comments are calling out Trump for his maskless rallies and downplaying of the pandemic — all the way from the beginning to the present, including his superspreading, bombastic behavior while infected with COVID. Oh, and there’s a bone-spurs remark in there too, since Trump’s implying that Fauci isn’t a patriot.

Also, not everyone is buying that Trump came up with “prognostications” on his own. He almost undoubtedly had help here, unless the roids have increased his vocabulary.

While Sharon Van Etten’s latest album Remind Me Tomorrow came out in early 2019, the singer has remained prolific ever since its release. Most recently, Van Etten offered a cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” to raise awareness surrounding mental health, and before that, the singer appeared on Idles leader Joe Talbot’s raucous quarantine talk show. Now, the singer shares a song she wrote for a documentary about the iconic Pepe The Frog meme.

Van Etten’s “Let Go” single features a slow-paced rise to a crashing medley of instruments. The track is leisurely and moving, not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the Pepe meme. But the documentary, titled Feels Good Man, isn’t as lighthearted as it may seem. Originally debuting at Sundance, Feels Good Man follows artist Matt Furie, Pepe’s creator, as he attempts to reclaim the image which had quickly morphed into a symbol of hate on 4Chan boards and concerning corners of the internet.

In a statement about writing the song for Feels Good Man, Van Etten said she wanted to create a sense of serenity after she first saw the film: “After watching the documentary, I just followed the feeling of coming to terms with something and tried to evoke peace through my melody and words. The song and film’s producer, Giorgio [Angelini], was a great collaborator and communicator and I was given a lot of freedom. That says a lot about the film and the people who made it.”

Listen to “Let Go” above.

Feels Good Man premieres 10/16 via PBS. Watch it here.

Proving that there’s a crossover between any two shows if you look hard enough (who could forget the Mad Men parody on Sesame Street?), Netflix’s The Haunting of Bly Manor has an unlikely connection to Peppa Pig.

Mike Flanagan’s horror series, currently the most-watched title on the streaming service, includes a breakout performance from nine-year-old actress Amelie Bea Smith, who plays creepy Bly Manor resident Flora. She’s also, as many viewers are just finding out, the voice of everyone’s second favorite kind British pig. (Piglet will always be number one; there is no shame in Peppa Pig finishing a respectable second.)

Bea Smith, who also had a recurring role on EastEnders, is the fourth voice artist to take on the role, following Lily Snowden-Fine, Cecily Bloom, and Harley Bird. Her first episode, “Valentine’s Day,” aired this year. As for Bly Manor, Smith isn’t allowed to watch the show, “because I think I’ll be scared. But I did have to still ask a few questions about how I should play [certain scenes] because I didn’t know much about it.” She might not watch the show, but plenty of others are, and they’re delighted by the Peppa revelation.

Parents can’t escape Peppa even when they’re watching hidden ghosts show.

Cloud Nothings have been super productive over the past few years. After releasing new albums in 2017 (Life Without Sound) and 2018 (Last Building Burning), the band’s Dylan Baldi and Jayson Gerycz put out a free jazz album a few months ago. Now Baldi is readying yet another new album, and this time, it’s a Cloud Nothings Effort: The Shadow I Remember, which is out on February 26, 2021.

The group also released the first look at the record, “Am I Something,” a raw rocker accompanied by a psychedelic, Lu Yang-directed video. Baldi says of the visual, “I became familiar with Lu Yang’s work through her exhibit in Cleveland, Ohio at MOCA Cleveland in 2017. I was really drawn to her approach of tying religion into gender and various gendered bodily functions. The animation style of some of her work is also exactly on my wavelength -i like a psychedelic genderless Sims game. Very excited to be able to work with Lu!”

Baldi also revealed the band worked on the album with esteemed producer Steve Albini, with whom they made their 2012 album Attack On Memory, noting, “we worked with albini again on this new album. he is the best. it felt like we were all adults this time around? whereas before i was simply a baby. anyway i am prepared for 700 interview questions about it, bring it on.”

Watch the “Am I Something” video above and find the The Shadow I Remember art and tracklist below. Also revisit our 2018 interview with Baldi here.

1. “Oslo”
2. “Nothing Without You”
3. “The Spirit Of”
4. “Only Light”
5. “Nara”
6. “Open Rain”
7. “Sound Of Alarm”
8. “Am I Something”
9. “It’s Love”
10. “A Longer Moon”
11. “The Room It Was”

The Shadow I Remember is out 2/26/2021 via Carpark Records. Pre-order it here.

In 2018, Jeff Tweedy published Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), one of the funniest and most insightful rock memoirs of recent years. For anyone interested in the Wilco frontman’s creative process and personal outlook, Let’s Go is as essential as any Wilco record. Tweedy must have felt that he was on a hot streak, because he’s back again with a new book out today, How To Write One Song, that delves even deeper into his artistic approach, only this time with a motivational twist.

As the title suggests, How To Write One Song aims to instruct the reader on how to do what Tweedy himself has done successfully for more than 30 years. Unlike many songwriters, who often bat away questions about their work habits by claiming that ideas simply come to them from some unseen higher power, Tweedy is refreshingly practical about the act of writing songs. In his book, he gives tips on how to write lyrics (taking a nap can be very helpful) and the best way to record a demo on your phone (singing in the bathroom will add reverb to your voice). He also offers tips on how to fight the existential battles that prevent people from pursuing their dreams, such as the tendency to judge ourselves as unworthy before we’ve even done anything.

More than that, however, Tweedy makes a case for songwriting — as well as creativity in general — as a way to improve your life. It doesn’t matter what the final result is, he writes. It’s the process of making something, and the way it allows us to live in the moment by discovering something new while also losing ourselves, that matters.

“I want to be a person who encourages more humans to do that — to have some private moments of creativity, whether they share their creations or not,” Tweedy writes. “We should have an army of people advocating for that. I think it’s the coolest thing in the world when someone steps outside their so-called station in life to indulge in a personal ‘art for the sake of art’ moment.”

Tweedy himself in recent years has been as creative as he’s ever been, putting out a series of solo releases along with the usual Wilco records. His latest LP, Love Is The King, drops October 23. (There is also a massive box set commemorating Wilco’s 1999 masterpiece Summerteeth due out November 6.) Ahead of that, I spoke with him about How To Write One Song and his overall philosophy about how songwriting is something anyone can do.

I wouldn’t want to call this a self-help book, per se. But there is an element of How To Write One Song that posits songwriting as a way to improve your life. Is that a fair summation?

I philosophize about this a lot. I think art is an essential part of life. Beauty and artwork that creates introspection and meaning and all kinds of ways to think about the world and have our perceptions changed, that’s all incredibly important. I feel like one of the best aspects of embracing art in your life is that it’s a better life. I know that kind of flies in the face of a lot of people’s opinions about what artists’ lives are like, but I don’t feel like that’s necessarily worthwhile to perpetuate. It is an incredibly great thing to do: to actively participate in your own life and your own imagination.

A lot of the book is talking about the process of creation and it seems like you’ve really put a premium on that — just enjoying the process and not being overly concerned with what the end result is going to be. Have you always thought that way? Or is that something that has evolved as you’ve gotten older?

I think it’s always been the case, it’s just an observation that became clearer to me as I got older. I’ve always benefited the most, personally, from the time spent creating, and the things that I struggle with and have caused me any type of minor suffering related to art has always come after that period. Like, just putting it out in the world and the melancholy feeling you get with other people weighing in sometimes. Just the frustration that comes with trying to get a song right with a live performance or something like that. But the act of creation itself that has generally been the part that, over time, has made itself clearly to be the most beneficial.

That part of the book really resonated with me, because I didn’t come to appreciate the process of writing until later in life. When I was younger, I was more preoccupied with the end point. In a way, you believe that making this thing will also make me a different person in some way, either because you’ll be more successful or because you’ll realize something about yourself. But I try not to get hung up on those “reward” aspects now, in part because you don’t really become “different.”

I’m embarrassed to say that I do still probably harbor some distorted belief that, once everybody hears this one song, they’re going to stop saying mean things about me. [Laughs.] I do sometimes have those weird little daydreams that a song’s going to be important or something like that. I’ve been much better off as I’ve learned to recognize what that is, and also remind myself of the reality that some of the songs I’ve written have become important to some people. I don’t always feel that, and I can’t feel that in a way that I can carry around with me. So, it’s much better for me to focus on the creative side and the act of creating than what the songs become or what it makes me. I don’t become anything really “different” ever.

You really demystify the process of songwriting. I interview songwriters a lot, and many times they don’t want to be analytical of their own work almost out of fear that if they’re too self-conscious about what they do that it’ll ruin their inspiration. So they’ll talk about being a “conduit” for ideas sent from some mysterious higher power.

There is a tendency to feel sort of superstitious. That in itself is self-conscious. I can’t think of anything more self-conscious than to not want to talk about something because you’re afraid that it’s going to change it somehow. What’s to stop you from having thoughts? Just putting them out into the air isn’t going to change anything.

I’ve thought a lot about the things that get mythologized, and none of that type of thinking is ever nearly as interesting to me as the reality of what’s happening. The reality is fascinating enough. The fact that people do this and reliably make stuff all over the world all the time in lots of different ways with lots of different motives and results and traditions, that’s pretty incredible to be a part of. It’s like pseudoscience. When you look at science, it is way more fascinating than pseudoscience. Bigfoot is nowhere near as interesting as just your typical garden spider.

What demystified songwriting for you? Was there a particular person who made you feel that you could do it?

I don’t really know. I think that the gift that I had was just pure delusion. That maybe is something I share with the greats. [Laughs.] Just this initial impulse that was completely oblivious to the facts. That I didn’t know how to play the guitar or I was really bad in school or all the things that should’ve stood in my way, I was pretty inoculated from all that for some reason. Then over time I think I demystified it for myself by just doing it a lot and ending up with different results, from learning to focus on the part of it that was basically process. But early on it was just a drive to do it, and I think you have to have that. Like, just being able to picture yourself as somebody that does that. It’s hard to do something that you can’t picture yourself doing.

You write about it in your first book, too, just the importance of thinking of yourself as a songwriter or a musician before you actually are one.

That’s one of the appeals of rock ‘n’ roll. That’s a word I always gave it. Punk rock would’ve fit. But basically just now I think of it as just being creative and having an artistic outlook on life. One of the main appeals, one of the main selling points, is this idea of self-liberation, self-freedom, feeling of freedom, freeing yourself from the constraints of your own mind, your own self-doubt, the slings and arrows of your friends and neighbors wanting you to stay in your place.

Are there any songwriters that are still mysterious to you, just in terms of what they are able to produce? Take Bob Dylan — you’re a songwriter, you know how songwriting works, but can you still wrap your head around what he does?

I don’t contemplate it a whole lot. If I think about Bob Dylan, what he does, what he gets out of himself year after year, all I think is he must read and write and think about it a lot more than a lot of other people and he’s been able to maintain that energy for a long time. He has protected the part of himself that is inspired, I think, in a way that I find inspiring myself. But as far what kind of process he might use, it’s not that important to me, I guess. All I really know is that there is a process that has to be at work for almost everybody. There isn’t a pure conduit lightning-rod songwriter out there that doesn’t even want to write songs, and yet they just keep coming to them.

You write about how judgment can be an impediment to creativity, and how the willingness to write a bad song can be the path to eventually writing a great song. Is getting past the impulse to judge yourself during the creative process the main roadblock you have to overcome?

I think that that’s obviously the biggest struggle for most people, myself included. Even right now when I hear you say, “You have to be okay with writing bad songs,” I picture this being in an interview and I can hear the voices of the people saying, “Well, that’s all he’s done for the last 15 years.” [Laughs.] I hear those voices. Sometimes I project them out onto the voices that you see and feel from the internet or from fan pages. But it’s the same commentary that everybody else has. There is some part of your ego that is going to protect your ability to be hurt and vulnerable and one of its only options, in a lot of cases, is to dissuade you from doing anything, from sticking your neck out and participating. I’ve learned to circumvent that and my life’s work is to figure out ways to push that side of myself away as much as possible. Anybody that wants to do anything creative and put it out into the world is going to have to navigate that and find other ways to protect themselves.

You started your career before the internet. Was it easier to be creative, in a way, before anyone could say what they thought and make it public, or was there just some other way to feel bad about yourself before the internet?

There just wasn’t as much. I think it was all the same ways to feel bad about yourself. You could argue it’s better now because there’s so much — you could probably find confirmation about almost any feeling you have about yourself as a creator. I could definitely go online and find a bunch of people that think I’m really great and I could find a bunch of people that hate my guts. That wasn’t at your fingertips back in the day. I kind of look at it, a lot of it, as stuff that’s not meant for me and isn’t really offered up with any kind of conviction or seriousness, like just basically being able to hear every conversation at every table at every bar in the world all at once. It’s just people talking shit most of the time.

But back in the day, I will say that fanzines were pretty vicious, and because there was less of it they carried a lot of weight. There were people that just reveled in writing meanly about other people’s art. Like, early punk rock and post-punk fanzines and independent rock fanzines were extraordinarily negative in a lot of cases, I thought, growing up. That would land and sting for quite some time. Some of those journalists, like Gerard Cosloy, became sort of semi-celebrities in their own right and their opinions were heavily weighted.

I’m curious about your work habits, which you write about a lot in the book. It sounds like you are either writing something every day, or you’re picking up a guitar, or doing something that is involved in creating something throughout the course of a day. Have you always been like that? Did you write your forthcoming record, Love Is The King, the same way that you wrote Summerteeth 20 years ago?

Well, I can’t remember 20 years ago. I think it would be the same except more so now: the same energy for just wanting to think of something new to sing. In the most basic way, I like having a new song to sing. It gives me a great deal of satisfaction to come up with something new to sing. So I feel driven to do that and it is a work ethic but it also really soothes some part of me. I’m trying to convey in the book how beneficial that is. So I would answer, even though I can’t remember, that it had to have been, for the most part, created the same way, at least in the initial songwriting stages.

In the book you write about the song “Can’t Stand It,” which was famously added to Summerteeth as a potential “pop” single at the request of the record company. You talk about how writing a song on demand was actually beneficial, even if you didn’t necessarily appreciate the request at the time.

I think it was fun to learn that. It wasn’t fun dealing with the record company at that period in time, or ever, but what it taught me was that I could give myself assignments and keep it closer to things that I really wanted to make, more so than the ambiguity of a “hit” song, which I’ve obviously never had a real clear idea of what that is. At that time my idea of writing a “hit” song was just to think a bit more about tempo and modernity, that maybe it was just a recording thing. Because I didn’t feel like I was writing not-pop songs.

I’ve read about songwriters who can improvise songs on the spot. You mention being able to do that in the book. How is that possible?

Right now, I am improvising language to respond to you. There are simple blocks of language and pieces that you can get pretty good at shaping together on the fly. I would assume that that’s kind of how you could do it, and some people are better at it than others. Sometimes I can do it and sometimes I can’t. I definitely stopped allowing myself to do it quite as much early on because I didn’t end up liking the lyrics as much and they were hard to shake if I’d already sung them in the studio as we recorded them.

You write in the book about being able to write songs in your sleep, too. I wonder if there’s a part of your brain that’s always writing songs, even if you’re not aware of it.

It makes sense to me that you would build neural pathways that are so used to thinking along those lines, like solving a crossword puzzle or a Rubik’s cube. It’s just a habitual movement that your brain likes to exercise. I don’t think I have the ability to turn it off all the time and it seems obvious to me that my brain keeps doing it somewhat while I’m sleeping just based on how often I wake up with song ideas and lyric ideas that finish songs.

You’ve made several albums outside of Wilco in the past five or so years. Is there a difference between a Wilco song and a Jeff Tweedy song?

No. I make stuff and I try and get it in a place that feels really good to me. Sometimes I record and build a demo in the studio and then move on to the next thing. Then I’m working on a record. If it’s me I’ll just find the stuff that feels best to me to sing at that moment. If it’s Wilco, I really rely upon just the feeling in the room when we listen to songs that I’ve written. I don’t want to force anything on them, so it generally ends up being what everybody else picks and seems to have some energy for.

Does putting your own name on a song, as opposed to a band name, inherently make it more personal?

I don’t think that I consciously try to be more personal. I just try and sing the things that feel good to sing, feel accurate. I would say that there are a lot of songs on the most recent Wilco records that feel very personal to me. I think that overall, though, when you put a band name on it and when the band has an identity, it does add a layer of anonymity to the singer. The way I’m perceived as a voice in that context changes, and I probably utilize that somewhere in the back of my mind when I’m writing lyrics or finishing lyrics for those songs that we’ve decided have become Wilco songs. There might be some part of me that understands that dynamic a bit better than I would be able to articulate it.

You write in the book about the necessity of “stealing” from your influences, because emulating something you like and failing to match it is a way to discover your own voice. I’m curious what you think about the idea of “originality” in songwriting. There have been instances of estates for older music legends suing new artists for essentially stealing ideas, like the Marvin Gaye estate going after Robin Thicke for “Blurred Lines.” But given that every artist borrows from other artists, can anything really be considered truly original?

Well, I think I would come down on the side of the Marvin Gaye estate on something like that, because it was very specifically built almost as a soundalike track, the way some commercials utilize old records to side-step paying people. But I don’t really know if I have any super strong opinions about it. In folk music — the musical tradition that I’m probably closest to — originality is not a primary concern. What the primary concern would be is telling the story effectively and making a connection and relating what you want to relate. Woody Guthrie always claimed that he never wrote an original melody on purpose, and it was only if he misremembered something he was trying to steal. At the same time, I think Woody Guthrie sounds like nobody else and he’s an icon of individuality and originality and uniqueness. He just used that as a platform to be himself.

I think we do absolutely narrow our views of what constitutes originality and it leaves out a lot of intangibles about how something can be taken in a novel way. I try not to think about it too much because the main thing I really want is the connection part, and it’s really rare for somebody to come out of the blue and make something that has a completely new shape, a completely new, novel approach, and yet still maintains this sort of connection, which is kind of an inescapable core of what we want in a song.

I know that for me, whenever I thought something was completely original, it was only because I was unfamiliar with whatever influenced it.

For sure. You hear a lot of young bands and there’s a lot pastiche going on and a lot of outright just, “I’m just going to take this and this is going to be my band now.” And I think it’s cool. There’s so much personal DNA at work in everything. Even if you really want to completely mine someone else’s vein, you are inevitably going to sound like yourself. I don’t know how successful you could be at being someone else.

How To Write One Song is out now via Dutton. Get it here.

EA Sports got a whole lot of flack for what happened with Madden NFL 21 earlier this year. The game had its charms, but on the whole, a certain kind of staleness and a bunch of gasp-inducing glitches caused the game to get panned by reviewers and gamers alike. While they are, of course, very different games, EA Sports got the chance to save face a bit a few months later with the release of its other behemoth video game franchise, FIFA 21.

Picking out why FIFA has a much better reputation than Madden is hard to identify. Perhaps it’s because of the inherent nature of the sports themselves, and one is more conducive to gaming than the other. Perhaps it’s because of the existence of a legitimate rival, as Madden has nothing while FIFA has Konami’s delightful PES series. Or perhaps it’s something else altogether, like this being a completely wrong read on the entire thing by someone who just likes FIFA more.

But whatever it is, EA Sports rolled out FIFA 21 last week, and unlike Madden, this is a solid, cohesive game that understands what it is and made improvements exactly where it had to. There’s one gigantic change in the game’s Career Mode, but otherwise, a number of the changes in FIFA were designed to make the game a little better in a bunch of different ways, rather than changing everything up in one fell swoop. The result is a wonderful game, and one that I am going to sink a whole lot of time into … well, at least until FIFA 22 comes out.

Let’s start with gameplay, which follows a pretty familiar path for those who are loyal to the series: Things feel awfully similar to the last game, only with a few tweaks. This has become commonplace among versions of the game under the Frostbite engine, which is very much a blessing and a curse. The familiarity that comes with playing FIFA is something that EA Sports seems to pride itself on, but every now and then, this leads to the game either feeling stale or a change not working, a la the game becoming far too defensive-minded last year to the point of feeling clumsy.

This year’s game finds the balance between “feel familiar” and “make little tweaks” nicely. The defending was the thing that stuck out to me — instead of games becoming hideous slop-fests, which they could easily feel like during FIFA 20, defending is more balanced this year. To add a counterbalance to that, though, you get punished if you dive into a tackle that does not work, so those who like to mash X/square or B/circle are put at an immediate disadvantage.

Passing feels far more controlled and not nearly as loose as it has in games past, which is bad for me as someone who likes to rip through balls like there’s no tomorrow, but is generally good for the game. And for those who are big fans of crosses and feel like they have been unnecessarily tricky, that isn’t quite as tough. EA Sports made it a point to tweak the fundamentals of football in this game — per its side: Passing, Blocking, Responsiveness, Manual Headers — and it was an unmitigated success.

Even something like how players move and interact with one another works. Agile Dribbling is fluid, Positioning Personality and Creative Runs are sharp additions to the game that make it feel more lifelike and responsive based off of how you want to play, and the Natural Collision System (the lynchpin of the improved defending) makes things feel less chaotic when players interact with one another on the pitch.It is important to mention here that I have not run into any sort of glitchy messes, so perhaps I am lucky there, but in terms of the gameplay, this is one of my favorite versions of FIFA in some time.

To get into the bells and whistles, FIFA largely kept its game modes the same, although it changed up Skill Games in a way that I think works perfectly, as it’s now a monster skill trainer. The House Rules are still there doing their thing, the act of playing VOLTA Football isn’t all that much different (although, full disclosure, I did not get to dive in too deeply and therefore have not gotten to use The Groundbreakers, which include everyone from current and former star footballers to Diplo and Anthony Joshua), and Ultimate Team understands not to mess with the formula all that much. The downside is that microtransactions are still a thing, which is bad, and will always be bad, even if I have spent my own money to acquire packs, because you kind of have to if you do not want to be left behind in FUT.

This year’s FIFA decided to go all-in on making tweaks to its Career Mode, which had grown so stale that Philadelphia 76ers star Joel Embiid took to Twitter last year and begged that something would be different this time around. Before diving into how the Manager mode is different in a good way, Player mode is as frustrating as that is better. You go somewhere, you train, you play, and … that’s kind of it. In every game where I have played that mode, for some reason, my manager puts me out of position and in a weird formation. Last year, I played as a winger who spent all of his matches as a midfielder. This year, I am a midfielder who was moved to center back. While a comprehensive, NBA 2K-style single-player story mode would be a nightmare, I feel like FIFA can do a little more here.

Being a manager, however, is more fun. There’s far more planning into getting your team ready for a game than usual — in past games, you’d put individual players through one of five allocated drills and that was it for a week. Now, there is a weekly training/rest schedule, and as the manager, it is your job to balance fitness, sharpness, and morale. It’s a bit tedious, but I generally like the idea.

I love the process by which a player gets a developmental plan, one which lets them change positions — understandably, it’s easier to change to a similar position (i.e. a center back to a defensive midfielder) than if you wanted to make a fullback into a striker — or change how they approach positions. I was also a big fan of the new mechanism through which you can simulate a game but follow along. Now, you are still managing an entire match, but you’re truly serving as manager, following along with dots that float on the field, managing fitness and player ratings, adjusting how your team plays, and if the situation calls for it, hopping in and taking care of business on your own.

That second thing is, quite possibly, my favorite addition to FIFA in years. While it is not quite as immersive as Football Manager, it is hard not to see the inspiration drawn from the legendary soccer sim. If you’re the kind of person who likes to build a team and leave their games to the computer, legitimately letting them feel like they’re turning FIFA into a game where they are the manager, it’s a blast. I do have a gripe with the amount of adjusting you can do to your various players’ instructions and your tactics, which is still a bit stale, but for a first attempt, this is quite good and quite fun.

Overall, FIFA 21 didn’t try to reinvent the wheel in a bunch of ways. Gameplay has the right tweaks, while FUT and VOLTA Football don’t try to do anything they do not need to do. If you buy a game for those things, you don’t really need to pick this one up right away, but if you want to get it for those things, you won’t be disappointed. But for the Career Mode fans, pick it up as soon as you can.

The NFL season has begun, bringing with it the Songs of the Season campaign. The aim for Songs of the Season is to highlight emerging artists by incorporating their music into broadcasts throughout the season, donating the proceeds to organizations chosen by the Jay-Z-led Inspire Change initiative. While last year’s season included contributions Lecrae, Royce Da 5’9″, and SASH, the first song of this year’s campaign is Ghanaian-American rapper Blackway’s “Heavyweight.”

Blackway, born in Brooklyn and raised in Ghana, is best known for contributing the song “What’s Up Danger” to the Spider-Man: Enter The Spider-Verse soundtrack. “I like to make music that motivates people,” he explains of “Heavyweight” in the press release. “My fans tell me those types of songs make them feel like a superhero. I wanted to bring that same energy when I got the opportunity to work on this song for the NFL. I feel like athletes are the closest thing we see to superheroes and being able to give back through my music with Inspire Change makes me feel like one, too.”

The NFL recently rescheduled eight games as a result of positive COVID tests among players, while things are looking grim for the Cowboys and Falcons; Dallas QB Dak Prescott was carted off the field after a gruesome ankle injury in Sunday’s game against the Giants, while Atlanta fired head coach Dan Quinn and General Manager Thomas Dimitroff after a horrendous 0-5 start.

Listen to Blackway’s “Heavyweight” above.