New Releases
Chiropractor Turned Country Star Eric Ethridge Releases "Dream Girl"
The singer from the great white north shares his latest offering, written by Dan + Shay.
03.07.2020
Photo by Jason Myers
Canadian country artist Eric Ethridge is at it again.
The former chiropractor-turned-country-music-star has been pleasing fans across North America since 2014. With his EP tearing up the Canadian iTunes country chart, a spot opening up for Florida Georgia Line, and his recent 24 weeks on SiriusXM's tastemaker program "On the Horizon," Ethridge is turning heads. To keep that momentum going, he just released a fresh single, written by Dan + Shay, and it deserves a listen right now.
A synth swell brings us into the song, quickly giving way to the more traditional country trappings of reverb-heavy plucked banjo and slide guitar. It builds rapidly to a full on pop chorus with distorted power chord punches. Ethridge sings in quick snatches about losing his "Dream Girl." Through clever wordplay, we hear this dream girl turn from personified perfection into a make-believe character that only exists in dreams. The track steadily expands with emotion, while the soundscape turns the echoes of the past into instrumental delay and volume swells. The song, like its subject, eventually fades away into memory.
Eric Ethridge has produced a solid piece here. While it doesn't break the mold or redefine the genre, it plays exceptionally well with the pop country toolkit, and a track like this is likely to be an easy crowd-pleaser. It's not difficult to picture this being played at a festival, with couples hugging and dancing to it as the sun sinks below the horizon. It's fun and flirty, with just the right amount of melancholy, enough pop for the mainstream crowd and enough twang for country fans. Listen up and sing along, because these lyrics are about to find a permanent home in your brain.
Follow Eric Ethridge Online: Web | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify
Related Articles Around the Web
- Eric Ethridge on Spotify ›
- Eric Ethridge (@EricEthridge) | Twitter ›
- Eric Ethridge Pines For What Could Have Been in 'If You Met Me ... ›
- Eric Ethridge (@ericethridgemusic) • Instagram photos and videos ›
- About — Eric Ethridge ›
- Eric Ethridge - If You Met Me First (Official Music Video) - YouTube ›
- Eric Ethridge - Home | Facebook ›
Culture Feature
Why "The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy" Is the Book of 2020
Don't Panic.
03.24.2020
In the opening pages of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Earth is destroyed. Now if that doesn't scream 2020 so far, what does?
In Douglas Adams's 1979 novel, which premiered as a radio series on BBC Radio4 in 1978 (42 years ago—but more about the significance of that number later), Earth is suddenly blown up in order to make room for an intergalactic superhighway. Now, in a year that has—after only 3 months, people—given us a contentious, confusing democratic primary, the death of Kobe Bryant, new and worsening facts about our climate and habitat at large, appalling leadership, and of course the rapid spread of and global shutdowns by the coronavirus (COVID-19), it seems impossible to turn to any source for comfort.
Enter The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: a novel that starts with the global annihilation that we might be heading for and then follows the characters as they cope with new realities, with isolation and loss, an endless information source that brings with it endless anxiety, and an egomaniacal, arrogant, selfish, attention-craving president of the galaxy.
<p></p><center><script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
<ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:468px;height:60px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-4301469008561137" data-ad-slot="9626795938"></ins>
<script>
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
</script></center><p></p><p>A quick synopsis for those who haven't read the novel (go read it): Arthur Dent is quickly saved by his buddy, Ford Prefect, right before Earth is destroyed. Turns out, Prefect is actually an alien and a researcher for a book called <em>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</em>, a book that strongly resembles the Internet: an endless source of material for everything you need to know. Under Prefect's guidance, they are able to jump onto the Vogon ship (bureaucratic alien species) that is about to demolish earth.Eventually they are thrown off the ship and catch a ride on the stolen Heart of Gold, which is being piloted by the renegade president of the galaxy named Zaphod Beeblebrox (who very much resembles Donald Trump), a depressed robot named Marvin, and a very bland, devoid of personality half-human named Trillion. They hitchhike with this crew as they embark on a journey towards Deep Thought, a computer system that has the answer to the "ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything."</p><p><div id="ezoic-pub-ad-placeholder-634"> </div>
<!-- End Ezoic - incontent11 - mid_content --></p><p>So how will this book help those struggling with the current madness that is 2020 so far? Let's start with the guide itself, the thing the novel is named after. It's given to the main character–the sheepish, timid, not so confident Arthur Dent–who's stuck alone, with nowhere to go, in a confusing and upsetting time. The only thing Dent has to turn to is a super computer-like device that holds all known information–for better or for worse. Does this sound like being quarantined in your house with only the Internet to keep you company, to confuse and upset you? </p><p><div id="ezoic-pub-ad-placeholder-636"> </div>
<!-- End Ezoic - incontent22 - long_content --></p><p>The way Adams describes the Guide is like this: "The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in." So yeah, it's just the Internet. </p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-youtube">
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="0e5da447e8a653c53c7729aa19d4bbdf"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eLdiWe_HJv4?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) Trailer # 1 - Martin Freeman HD</small>
<small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">
<a href="https://youtu.be/eLdiWe_HJv4" target="_blank">youtu.be</a>
</small>
</p><p><strong>Next, let's look at maybe the most glaring, unsetting similarity with the novel and today: the president. </strong>In <em>HHGTTG</em>, the president of the galaxy is a two-headed, three-armed, egomaniac who before becoming president was famous just for being famous; he was made president just to distract the citizens of the galaxy. Adams even describes him as an "adventurer, ex-hippie, good-timer, (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terribly bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch." Later on in the novel, he writes: "[He's] pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn't understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so—but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous."</p><p><div id="ezoic-pub-ad-placeholder-637"> </div>
<!-- End Ezoic - incontent3 - longer_content --></p>
From Your Site Articles
- 11 Books That Changed Celebrities' Lives - Popdust ›
- Best Books to Read While Quarantined - Popdust ›
- Donald Trump's Reading List - Popdust ›
Related Articles Around the Web
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Adams, Douglas ... ›
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) - IMDb ›
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - BBC Radio 4 ›
- Of mice and spacemen - “The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy ... ›
- Don't panic! The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is back | Television ... ›
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: 40 years of parody and ... ›
Keep Reading
Show less
Now that you've flooded Instagram with photos of black squares, it's time to hunker down for some real activism.
If you're a white person, you're sitting on top of about four centuries of institutionalized racism. In the wake of George Floyd's murder by police and countless Black Lives Matter protests across the nation, it's time to show up—with your body, with your voice, and with your brain.
<p>It's no longer OK to just be "not racist." You have to be actively anti-racist, and there's a growing list of <a href="https://www.popdust.com/64-anti-racism-resources-2646142533.html" target="_self">resources available</a> to help you do just that. And what better way to learn than by sticking your nose into a book?</p><h2></h2><p>Below, we've compiled a list of 10 books—many of which are bestsellers—by Black authors that will give you a much more thorough understanding of how deeply racism runs in the United States.</p>
<p><center><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
<ins class="adsbygoogle"
style="display:inline-block;width:468px;height:60px"
data-ad-client="ca-pub-4301469008561137"
data-ad-slot="9626795938"></ins>
<script>
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
</script></center></p>
<!-- Ezoic - underfirst11 - under_first_paragraph -->
<div id="ezoic-pub-ad-placeholder-630"></div>
<!-- End Ezoic - underfirst11 - under_first_paragraph -->
Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzM2NzY3MC9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYwNzQ5MzkyOH0.2Y3FZpKEbMrnZE49IGlysU2f6GbX7Bbs2kYss-D0HcY/img.png?width=980" id="b07e8" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="9ea5b5920a7d49470cd16386553e7c45" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="patricia hill collins" />
<p>In this 1990 book, author and academic Patricia Hill Collins takes a deeper look at the works of Black feminist thinkers like Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde.</p>
From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web
Keep Reading
Show less
