We Speak Music

Soapman Unleashes New Single ‘Y. L. T. Y.’

Published

1 year ago

May 20, 2025

Soapman’s “Y. L. T. Y.” is a song that doesn’t arrive—it collides. Like a car crash in technicolor, it’s loud and unrelenting, but beautiful in its own strange symmetry. The guitars jitter and jolt like thoughts that won’t settle, and the drums sound like someone running down a hallway, late for something they can’t name. This isn’t music that waits for you to catch up—it expects you to dive in and swim against the current.

There’s a kind of poetry in the way the song unravels. The lyrics don’t tell a story so much as they spill, line after line tumbling into each other like dominoes tipped by an overthinking mind. Each phrase feels like a synapse firing, a raw, unrehearsed transmission from the deepest, most chaotic corners of consciousness. And yet, somehow, it grooves. Somehow, it makes you want to dance.

Beneath the glitch and swagger is a quiet sort of truth—one that pulses through the noise like a heartbeat. Soapman are doing more than just making sounds; they’re documenting emotion in its most unfiltered form. It’s the sound of joy fighting to be heard through static. Of something falling apart, but doing it with style.

There are echoes of other bands here—yes, shades of Graham Coxon’s anxious charm, the grand oddity of British Sea Power—but Soapman aren’t mimicking anyone. They’ve carved a sound with sharp edges and soft hearts, where chaos is not something to be avoided, but celebrated.

“Y. L. T. Y.” is a love letter to disorder. A reminder that being a mess doesn’t mean you aren’t magnificent. And in a world that too often demands clarity, Soapman choose noise, color, and honesty instead. It’s a beautiful choice.

We Speak Music

RANDY EDELMAN & TONY ORLANDO • JULY 24

Published

14 hours ago

July 15, 2026

Jimmy Star

One Last Encore for the Golden Ear

Reunited After Fifty Years, Randy Edelman and Tony Orlando Take the Stage in the Shadow — and the Light — of Clive Davis

Every great song has someone standing just offstage — the one who heard it first, believed in it hardest, and pushed it into the world. For an entire golden age of American music, that someone was Clive Davis. And when Randy Edelman and Tony Orlando reunite on Friday, July 24, 2026, at 8:00 PM at the Bellmore Movies & The Showplace — sharing a stage for the first time in more than fifty years — the man with the golden ear will be standing just offstage one final time, the way he always was. This time, in memory.

Davis, who passed away in June, was the towering figure of the modern record business: president of Columbia Records, founder of Arista, and, to the very end, chief creative officer of Sony Music Entertainment. He guided Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, Santana, Barry Manilow, and Alicia Keys — a roster that reads like the history of the radio itself. But the truest measure of Clive Davis was never only the superstars. It was the moments — a phone call, a green light, a single yes — that quietly changed the course of an artist’s whole life. The two men reuniting in Bellmore are living proof.

The Yes That Made Tony Orlando

In 1970, Tony Orlando was a music executive at CBS’s April-Blackwood publishing house, his teenage hitmaking days behind him, when friends asked him to lend his voice to a little song called “Candida.” It was a favor — sung anonymously, with a possible conflict of interest hanging over the whole thing, since Orlando worked in the Columbia Records family. The decision could have been killed at the top. Columbia’s president was Clive Davis. He let it happen. “Candida” went around the world, “Knock Three Times” followed it to number one, and “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” became the biggest-selling record of 1973. One quiet yes from Clive Davis, and Tony Orlando and Dawn — Carnegie Hall, primetime television, five number-one hits, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — came into being.

The Believer in Randy Edelman

Randy Edelman’s road ran through the same rarefied world. A young staff songwriter at that very same April-Blackwood office — where Orlando was the executive and Edelman the kid with the melodies — he wrote “Weekend in New England,” which Barry Manilow, Davis’s signature Arista superstar, carried into the Top Ten and into history. Edelman himself recorded as an Arista artist under Davis’s banner, and his songs found their way to The Carpenters, Patti LaBelle, Olivia Newton-John, and Dionne Warwick before Hollywood claimed him as one of its most beloved composers — The Last of the Mohicans, Gettysburg, Dragonheart, The Mask, My Cousin Vinny, Kindergarten Cop, the MacGyver theme, and the Emmy-winning music of NBC’s Olympics. The golden ear heard Randy Edelman coming, too.

The Encore

So understand what July 24 truly is. On the surface: a magnificent evening of music — Randy Edelman at the piano, presented by Tony Orlando, in the intimate, roughly 325-seat jewel that is the oldest theater on Long Island, just steps from the Long Island Rail Road. Songs, film themes, and a half-century of stories between two men whose paths began in the same office and never crossed a stage again until now.

But beneath the surface, it is something more tender: the first time these two artists stand together in a world without Clive Davis — and the most fitting memorial imaginable. Not a eulogy. A concert. Because men like Davis never asked for monuments; they asked for music. Every note played in Bellmore that night is a note he, in some way, made possible — two careers his instinct touched, harmonizing at last.

The lights go down, the piano begins, and somewhere just offstage, the golden ear is listening. This one’s for Clive.

Randy Edelman & Tony Orlando — Reunited After 50 Years

Friday, July 24, 2026 • 8:00 PM

Bellmore Movies & The Showplace • Bellmore, New York — steps from the Long Island Rail Road

Tickets available via Eventbrite

Produced by JD Sarantakos, JD’s Productions •Supported by Paul’s Pianos 1115 Theodora St., Franklin Square, NY 11010