When I saw Japanese Breakfast on the Jubilee tour this year, I got chills hearing Michelle sing: “How’s it feel to stand at the height of your powers, to captivate every heart, projecting your visions to strangers who feel it, who listen, who linger on every word?” With this release, I imagine she knows the feeling.

Sometimes the best jewels of creativity are born under pressure, and Dua proved herself to be the rising workaholic of pop as she promoted Future Nostalgia from her London apartment.

When how i’m feeling now emerges from its fragments as a fully-formed record, it will be the most “present” pop album in recent memory. Listeners will hear tracks that aren’t being released in spite of the pandemic; they only exist because of it. Charli has opened the door to a new artist-to-fan dynamic and stretched the notion of “authenticity” in pop music to its limits.

Finding a Southwestern-style home in Southwestern Ohio can be a bit like finding a needle in a haystack—if the haystack was a bunch of ranch, colonial, and Tudor houses. And good luck looking in Hyde Park. But sure enough, one of those proverbial needles is tucked down a private drive near Edwards Road, and it could be yours.