Sweet Sweet Music Blog

Sometimes the best records are born from the worst circumstances. After a frustrating battle to restore his previous album to streaming platforms following a false accusation of artificial streaming, David Woodard channeled that anger, urgency, and renewed sense of purpose into Skeletons. The result is his rawest and most immediate collection yet—a record where power pop hooks meet punk energy, and where vulnerability is worn as proudly as defiance.

Skeletons has quite an unusual backstory. What happened, and how did you arrive at a sound that leans just a little more toward punk than power pop?

Two months after releasing Everything Belongs, I got an email from CDBaby telling me Apple Music had removed the album for irregular streaming activity. They listed bots, fake accounts, and playlist manipulation as possible infractions. None of which I had done.

CDBaby told me to contact Apple Music directly. Apple Music told me they only deal with distributors. I went back to CDBaby. They ghosted me. For weeks. I tried social media. I filed a BBB complaint. I watched my weekly streams drop to zero. Eventually CDBaby replied, reiterated why the album had been removed, and closed the case.

So I reopened it. Filed another BBB complaint. Kept pushing. A few days before Christmas they agreed to resubmit. The next morning it was back.

I tell this story because the system is designed to make you give up. If this happens to you, don’t. Keep pushing.

As for the sound of Skeletons, that story starts a couple of years earlier. I randomly picked a music documentary one night and landed on Filmage: The Story of Descendents/All. I had never heard of the Descendents. I watched it eight times. Listened to their music constantly. Fell down the rabbit hole of everyone they influenced. Even travelled to Chicago to see them.

I grew up in the suburbs in the late seventies and eighties. Punk was happening but I was too young and too removed to get it. So, I feel like I am living my musical life backwards. Discovering at 57 what I should have found at 17. Skeletons is what that sounds like.

On the title track, you really go for it vocally, making the performance feel incredibly powerful yet also very vulnerable. Was that contrast intentional, or did that tension simply emerge naturally as you were recording it?

I don’t consider myself a vocalist. I spent twenty-five years playing with people who were real vocalists and learned what I could from watching them work.

When I stepped out on my own, I had to make peace with having a limited set of tools. I have some range (I can squeeze out a high A# if I must), and I like what my voice does when I am pushing hard. There is something that comes out under pressure that I find more interesting than anything I produce when I am comfortable.

For the studio-philes, I also switched from a condenser mic to a dynamic mic for vocals. Condenser mics reward control and precision. Dynamic mics reward commitment. For a rawer record it made sense.

The vocal on Thus Far is probably the best example. The inspiration was a YouTube video of a street band in the UK performing U2’s With or Without You. The singer is just singing his guts out on a street corner. Everything he has. Perfectly imperfect. I wanted to chase that feeling.

Whether you call it power pop or punk pop, the music lives and breathes through irresistible hooks and catchy choruses. It must be a wonderful feeling to write a sad song where all those elements come together so perfectly. What does that feel like as a songwriter?

You have to have songs people want to listen to. That’s it. Nothing saves a record full of songs no one wants to hear.

I’m grateful I can do what I do. Modern technology is remarkable. A guy in a room in Nashville makes a record and someone in Sweden finds it and plays it on their radio show. That still gets me.

And when someone tells you a song meant something to them, that’s the whole reason you pick up the guitar in the first place. Every musician reading this knows exactly what I mean.

Given the way this record came together, I imagine there was an even stronger desire to prove yourself and make sure people heard it. Did you feel that, or was it still most important simply to make the record you truly believed in?

The initial impulse was about flipping the script. I had been accused and effectively convicted of something I didn’t do. That is a peculiar kind of shame and embarrassment. The quickest antidote I could think of was to get something new into the world as fast as possible.

The irony is that urgency probably helped the record more than any deliberate artistic intention could have.

Everything Belongs was me trying to be edgier, and I like what I did. But looking back I was reaching for some low hanging fruit of politics to feed a sense of discontentedness.

With Skeletons the urgency and discontentedness was personal. I wasn’t trying to sound productively maladapted. I just was.

David Woodard and the band sound absolutely huge on Skeletons. How did you achieve the sound you had in mind?

Less was more. That’s the honest answer.

Fewer takes. Less processing. More economy in the sonic space. The blueprint is basically two guitars, bass, and drums. The vocal harmonies are sparser with more duets than trios and less stacking. Everything that remains is working harder.

A lot of this was unintentional. Recording fast to flip the script on a bad situation produces its own kind of serendipity. Some of the things I like most about this record I didn’t plan.

Bent van Looy, who in recent years has released a handful of beautiful solo albums in collaboration with Jason Falkner, is often perceived as a dandy—an intellectually vain figure—and rightly so. Much like Jarvis Cocker, he embraces this persona with flair, and in both cases, it’s a joy to witness and to listen to. That was certainly true last Wednesday, when Van Looy led the long-awaited return of his band Das Pop after a 14-year hiatus.

In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, following the decline of grunge, Belgian indie pop experienced a golden era. Bands like K’s Choice, dEUS, Soulwax, and Das Pop released unique and compelling music that reached far beyond Belgium’s borders.

Now, with just one new song in hand, Das Pop is staging a reunion, and their performance at De Roma in Antwerp felt like a triumphant homecoming. Van Looy called the stage—set in a venue with the grandeur of an opera house and the acoustics of a premier pop temple—his home.

Van Looy clearly understands the unwritten rules of pop band reunions: it’s not just about playing the hits. Of course, the hits are there—sung loudly, danced to, embraced in moments of shared nostalgia—but it’s during the deeper cuts that the bond between band and audience grows strongest. The hall fills with a sense of intimacy and devotion. This is no place for critics; this is a gathering of true fans. A celebration of recognition, of recent nostalgia, and of the vibrant legacy of Belgian pop music.

The Guess Who, the legendary Canadian rock band known for hits like “American Woman” and “These Eyes,” is back together! Original members Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings have announced that they will go on tour in 2026 under the name The Guess Who. This reunion follows a years-long legal battle over the use of the band name, which was settled in September 2024 in favor of Bachman and Cummings.

What’s strange, though, is that in recent years there was a really solid version of the band recording new music and playing live extensively. Plein D’Amour from 2023 is a refreshingly strong album, with a sound that blends the playful ’90s power pop of Jellyfish with the early ’80s AOR of bands like Dakota, Donnie Iris, and Franke and the Knockouts—all delivered by Derek Sharp, a fantastic vocalist.

After Bachman and Cummings reclaimed the band name, the recent history was wiped from social media, and suddenly everything is about American Woman again. But Plein D’Amour is too good to be forgotten, and has now been re-released as the debut of Derek Sharp and the Champagne Jam. Go listen to it!

This week I found myself deep in the pages of an old Australian Rolling Stone issue featuring the 200 best Australian albums. Unsurprisingly, it included many of my longtime favorites—Cold Chisel and Jimmy Barnes, Paul Kelly, You Am I, Crowded House, The Go-Betweens, Australian Crawl, and Hoodoo Gurus. But I also discovered something I’d somehow missed: Icehouse by a band then still called Flowers. The album’s title eventually became the band’s name, and frontman Iva Davies would later find international success with sleek, shimmering hits like “Crazy” and “Hey, Little Girl.” While I’ve always enjoyed those songs, they felt a bit too polished for my taste, which is probably why I never dug deeper.

But that glossy finish is absent on Icehouse, the debut. What you hear instead is a band in the midst of a raw, inspired search for its own voice—lifting ideas from all corners of the early ’80s soundscape. There’s Ultravox in “Walls,” The Knack in “Sisters,” Styx in “Boulevarde,” The Cars in “Nothing to Do,” INXS in “Can’t Help Myself.” And yet, these aren’t just imitations—they feel like touchpoints in a larger collage. The album stands as a kind of beautiful watermark for the New Wave sound of 1982: a swirling, energetic hodgepodge of everything that was vibrant and in motion at the time. What a great surprise.

This Top 200 list is incredibly rich, and if you ever come across it, I hope it takes you on as rewarding a journey of discovery as it did for me. I’m not done yet—next up: the Sunnyboys. Of course they’re on there too, and the editors of Rolling Stone place them on the same pedestal as The Modern Lovers. I think I see that differently, but there’s no denying that this collection is special—challenging and full of gems, even by today’s standards.

Until a few weeks ago, I didn’t know Dean Wareham. But a friend invited me along because one of his favorite Dutch alt.country bands was opening for Wareham at dB’s, right here in Utrecht.

In preparation, I took a deep dive into Wareham’s catalog, but I didn’t immediately connect with the key moments. It turned out I had heard his music before — and even reviewed it. In the early 2000s, I listened to a couple of albums he made with his wife under the name Dean & Britta, for hanx.net, a website I ran with two friends.

But that night, from the very first notes, I was shown a beauty I hadn’t picked up on during my prep. Wareham’s storytelling is lovely, but above all, it’s his guitar — that “why my guitar gently weeps” kind of sound — that truly stands out. He played a few songs from his new solo album, but he, Britta, and the drummer clearly knew what the crowd came for: the Galaxie 500 and Luna classics.

Highlights included Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste, 23 Minutes in Brussels, and a truly stunning Listen, the Snow is Falling, sung beautifully by Britta. But naming just three songs doesn’t do justice to the rest of the set.

The show felt like an invitation to dive deeper — I want to understand this alt.pop better. But it also confirmed something I’ve long suspected: when a band is playing just around the corner, you really should go.

Nada Surf is one of my favorite bands. They love playing in the Netherlands — and have done so regularly in recent years — which means I’ve seen them five times since the pandemic, usually in Amsterdam, where they have a soft spot for venues like De Melkweg and Paradiso. But the most special show for me was right here in my hometown of Utrecht. Seeing my kids and the son of my best friend — by far the youngest in the crowd — throw their arms around each other and sing along at the top of their lungs to the band’s most well-known songs… that’s a kind of joy you never forget.

A few weeks ago, Nada Surf played at Paard in The Hague — another legendary Dutch venue, though one I don’t often visit. After a long day at work, I wasn’t really feeling up for it. It’s a bit farther than Amsterdam, and there were plenty of reasons to skip this one. But I’m so glad I didn’t. It felt like the band had something to prove, playing outside their usual Amsterdam stronghold, and the audience didn’t entirely know what to expect — I got the sense many were there just to hear Popular. They got that, sure, but the heart of the set was built around songs from their fantastic new album, Moon Mirror.

Matthew Caws is a great singer, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard him sing with such range and clarity as he did that night. When everything falls into place like that — and it really did — you realize just how powerful a deeply personal song like Mathilda can be. How behind their controlled, thoughtful sound lie beautiful stories and gorgeous guitar work. Nada Surf doesn’t go for big emotional gestures — they’re not flashy or showy — but on nights like this, you listen more closely and discover an intimate beauty you rarely find elsewhere.

And then, as if that weren’t enough, they played Cold to See Clear — a hidden gem in their overwhelmingly rich catalog.

This week, they announced two more Dutch shows, in Breda and Deventer, moving further away from the capital. Late in their career, Nada Surf is still winning over new hearts — and plenty more are sure to follow.

Achilles Past is one of those songs where you instantly know it’s a cut above the rest. The atmosphere clicks right away, and the first notes hit home. The new single by The Black Watch pulls me straight back to the early ’80s, to the time when music started to take over my life, when bands like The Stranglers, Talk Talk, Echo & the Bunnymen, and The Smiths explained the world to me. If a song can, within seconds, transport me back to that feeling—and let me, now 55 years old, be completely carefree for three minutes, wanting nothing more than to just lose myself in the music, with not a trace of nostalgia—then I know for sure: this song is better than the rest.