Artists

Click here to subscribe to the Spotify playlist.On “Celebrate,” the second last song on Malibu, Anderson .Paak sings “time never cares if you’re there or not there.” Time’s infinite indifference to our finite human experience elicits reverence, not concern or fear, from .Paak, who reasons at the end of the verse, “lets celebrate while we still can.” From growing up in Oxnard, California, to his pursuit of love and building a meaningful career as a musician, it’s made abundantly clear throughout Malibu, that .Paak’s life experiences have informed the perspective that his brief time on earth is an opportunity that cannot go to waste. This awareness arrives as a lyrical theme, but the songs themselves move with a life and freedom that suggest he’s motivated by his biggest limitation of all, time, not burdened or rushed by it.Part of what makes the record so compelling is .Paak’s use of place in conjunction with the theme of time. Parallels can be drawn to Kendrick Lamar’s relationship to his hometown, Compton, on To Pimp A Butterfly, which Lamar uses as a kind of measure for the ways success has changed him. There’s a dissonance within Lamar between the Kendrick that grew up in his hometown seeing his city’s place within hip hop history, longing to start a career of his own, and the Kendrick that now returns as a major star. For .Paak, Malibu is an aspirational place, and having finally made it there, much of the record is about him wanting to make the best of things while he’s still can, feeling as though he’s on the cusp of greatness. This philosophy is represented in his thoughts on his career and creativity, but also finds its way onto the dancefloor and into the bedroom.For someone so bound to the idea of “living in the moment,” .Paak’s music moves effortlessly through time via style, channeling vintage soul, funk, disco and boom-bap as needed, uniting these sounds with his mix of sung and rapped vocals. Also helping to make Malibu’s omnivorousness sound seamless is a sizeable cast of contributors, from his tried and true backing band, The Free Nationals, to more seasoned players like jazz pianist Robert Glasper and bassist Pino Palladino. Beats provided by luminaries like 9th Wonder, fellow Oxnardian Madlib, and DJ Khalil fluidly intertwine with more modern productions courtesy of Montreal-based DJs Pomo and Kaytranada. Paak trades verses with contemporaries like Rapsody, BJ The Chicago Kid and Schoolboy Q, while also getting nods from The Game and Talib Kweli. Though such an impressive lineup could overwhelm the record, each guest contribution has been deployed thoughtfully, playing to their strengths as well as .Paak’s.This playlist takes a close look at the supporting cast of musicians, producers and samples on Malibu, finding a throughline between their work and .Paak’s own in both sound and theme.

Chance the Rapper owned hip-hop in 2016. He provided the musical backbone of Kanye’s Life of Pablo, partied with Beyonce at the VMAs, hung out with Obama at the White House, headlined his own festival, and released the groundbreaking mixtape/album Coloring Book. In terms of larger cultural impact, there’s very few rappers this decade who’ve matched Chance’s 2016 run. To an extent, it seems destined that Chance the Rapper would reach this stature -- he’s been buzzed about in underground circles since his 2012 mixtape 10 Day, and he comes from the upper echelons of Chicago’s political elites: his father is currently serving as the chief of staff for Mayor Rahm Emanuel -- but his moment in the limelight is a weird by-product of a dark political and cultural moment. The joy and euphoria of his rhymes, and the mindfulness and positivity of his persona, provide an anecdote to 2016’s riots, terrorism, police shootings, and political demagogues. He embodies the way we want to see ourselves, our future and our culture. For hip-hop fans, particularly those who fashion ourselves purists of a certain variety, he also reflects how we’d like to think of the genre. And part of the joy of listening to Coloring Book is picking apart his influences and how he reflects hip-hop. The smartly euphoric uplift of “No Problems” recalls Kanye during his pop maximalism peak, while the “Blessings” channels the strands of gospel that pops up in everyone from Tupac to Anderson.Paak. Though he reps his hometown of Chicago -- and his music contains echoes of everyone from Juke legend DJ Rhashad to classic boom bap icon Common -- he’s also has omnivorous tastes, channeling LA underground absurdists Freestyle Fellowship and the sludgy H-Town hip-hop of Mike Jones. For this playlist, we trace some of those influences and try to unpack Chance’s deceptively dense masterpiece, Coloring Book. You can subscribe to the playlist here. We’ve also curated a playlist of some of our favorite interviews of the rapper. Check it out below. -- Sam Chennault

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist right here.Lady Gaga once seemed so untouchable, perched on skyscraping heels while spinning dirty innuendos into chart-topping gold. But like the fame she has so gloriously glorified, shes also fickle—sometimes to a fault. Now, she simply wants to be our slightly wild drinking buddy eager to cause a scene at the dive bar in her Bud Light crop top and ratty cut-offs. Or at least this is the scrappy image shes conceived for her fourth solo album, Joanne.Since her arrival, Gaga has been constantly, exhaustedly calculating her next move. On Joanne, she speeds up that process, attempting reinvention with nearly every song. It makes for a scattered album with little focus: Even the title, named after her late aunt who died young of lupus, makes no sense in the context of, say, the reggae-tinged self-pleasuring ode "Dancin in Circles."But it also makes for one of pops more exciting releases of 2016. And thats partially due to her choice of collaborators: She pushes for indie cred by enlisting Tame Impalas Kevin Parker for "Perfect Illusion," a move that becomes somewhat overshadowed by Mark Ronsons disco-fied production and the chorus likeness to Madonnas "Papa Dont Preach." Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme is more successful at pulling that rock-bred rawness out of her on the Springsteen-soaring, Pat Benatar-nodding anthem "Diamond Heart."But when Gaga ditches the 80s glamour, she makes an even better case as a convincing Spaghetti western seductress alongside hippie-eccentric Father John Misty on "Sinners Prayer"; a slinky soul sister to Florence Welch on "Hey Girl"; and even a country crossover star, making the gorgeous ballad "Joanne" her "Jolene" and giving Taylor one more thing to shake off with the honky-tonkin "A-Yo," co-penned by Nashville hitmaker Hillary Lindsey. Forget that dive bar girl— with all that (and more), Gaga suddenly seems untouchable again.For this playlist we attempt to trace the influences and collaborators behind Joanne, which deserves way more than one listen to fully unpack.

Deep in the heart of Nicolas Jaars latest album, theres an extended domestic vignette: Jaar, a small boy, at home with his father, the Chilean visual artist Alfredo Jaar. Their talk, in Spanish, is playful and perhaps inconsequential; its actual content matters less than the way their voices charge the music with a special aura. Here is a tape, the snippet seems to say, rescued from a box long forgotten in the back of a closet; here is a memory brought to the light of day.It signals the extent to which Sirens—depending on how you count, either his second or third or fourth proper album—is the young electronic musicians most personal recording yet. As he explained to Pitchfork, with his previous records, he had taken aspects of his own identity for granted. "But in the months leading up to Sirens," he says, "there was a lot of change in my life—when you come back from a long tour, you really have to pick up the pieces in a way."And the album really does feel like a process of unpacking. It takes stock of the elements that have long characterized his work—the slow tempos, freeform arrangements, and shadowy atmospheres—while confidently pushing into a number of new directions at once. The pensive piano and effects of the opening "Killing Times" give way to a fairly rocking vocal number that sounds for all the world like a cover of the Bauhaus side-project Tones on Tail. "Leaves" incorporates a plucked string instrument—koto, perhaps—with ambient textures in a way that suggests an ambient musician like Biosphere. "No," the song that features his childhood home tape, taps into a spongy reggaeton beat faintly reminiscent of the Berlin producer Poles scratchy ambient dub—though the songs examination of his multi-national identity (Jaar, whose Chilean parents fled their home country after Pinochets coup in 1973, grew up between Chile, Paris, and the United States) also recalls the Ecuadorian-American musician Helado Negros own multi-lingual self-portraits.There are further surprises along the way: "Three Sides of Nazareth" hints at New York proto-punks Suicide as well as the contemporary UK musician Powell—which is pretty funny, because in most respects youd never think to mention Jaar and Powell in the same sentence. And it ends with a gorgeous, airy doo-wop song that cant help but bring to mind the Beach Boys weightless harmonies. Whatever else Nicolas Jaar may intend with his choice of title, theres no denying the seductive power of the final songs ethereal web of harmonies. Like everything on the album, it draws you in.

Calling Anderson .Paak an R&B singer shortchanges him. Under the moniker, NxWorries, his 2016 collaboration with producer Knxwledge, Yes Lawd!, the LA musicians pleading, lurching voice carries the weight of that genre’s history -- most distinctly recalling the bluesy soul of O.V. Wright -- but you can also hear the heft and bravado of hip-hop, a byproduct of both .Paak’s early years at the seminal underground label Stones Throw and his association with Dr. Dre and Aftermath Records. He’s of a generation of singers who came of age in rap’s shadows, and this makes for a strange nostalgia; a hall of mirrors where soul refracts hip-hop refracting soul, creating a sound that is uncanny.And while Yes Lawd! feels singular and very much of this moment, the sound that Knxwledge and .Paak crafted is the culmination of a strain of soul that has been bubbling in the LA underground scene (and beyond) for at least a decade. The twin pillars of the sound are J. Dilla and Madlib. The former worked with D’Angelo and Erykah Badu to craft neo soul in the 90s, while the latter opened the door of hip-hop towards psychedelia and outre world music. Their syncopated drums, hazy samples and penchant for compensational pastiche can be heard in the everyone from Flying Lotus to OmMas Keith, the latter of whom helped craft Frank Ocean’s 2016 album Blonde.Yes Lawd! feels like a distillation of that sound -- Madlib’s presence is most clear in the compositions sketch-like quality, but there’s also a pop sensibility grounded in 90s R&B and the generation of forgotten alt. soul groups of the ‘00s, most notably Foreign Exchange (a group comprised of Little Brother vocalist Phonte and Dutch producer Nicolary) and the underrated LA group J*DaVeY, a trashy, funky duo who proclaimed themselves the “Black Eurythmics.”For this playlist, we peel back onion on this universe, tracing the influences of NxWorries; .Paak and Knxwledge’s solo work; as well as samples and the work of guest and collaborators. If you love the new album, as many do, this should provide great complimentary listening. Subscribe to the playlist here.

Subscribe to this Spotify playlist right here.Pavement’s wildest, wooliest LP sits squarely in the middle of its career. In the wake of 1994’s indie totem Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, conventional wisdom held that 1995’s Wowee Zowee would be the moment when this quintet broke through to the mainstream. Instead, a mischievousness impulse won out, one that our musical culture is all the richer for. Primary songwriters Stephen Malkmus and Steve Kannberg dug deep into influences old and new, emerging with the scuzz-rock equivalent of a moth-eaten Choose Your Own Adventure book. Much of Wowee Zowee’s charm lies in its looseness, its abject lack of seriousness, the constant sense that things could fly off the rails at any moment; the album shares this DNA with the catalogue of Memphis’ The Grifters, a group frequently recorded by Wowee producer Doug Easley. Meanwhile, the gauzy, pedal steel-soaked “We Dance” recalls the woozy grandeur of “Quicksand,” from David Bowie’s Hunky Dory. Zig-zagging rager “Flux=Rad” cops attitude from “Let’s Lynch the Landlord,” a classic barnstormer by the San Francisco punk outfit Dead Kennedys. The freewheeling back end of “Half a Canyon” salutes Germany’s krautrock originators by way of Pavement’s 1990s peers Stereolab (“Exploding Head Movie”), while the nagging tug-o-war guitars powering the point where “Fight This Generation” crests can be traced back to key influence The Fall (“Jawbone + the Air-Rifle”). Olympia, Washington’s Bikini Kill celebrated an anti-corporate ethos that “Serpentine Pad” emulated, but as “AT&T” demonstrates, Pavement certainly weren’t above polishing a Nirvana-grade melody until it shone like a slacker anthem. Few albums have been quite so willing and eager to lead everywhere at once. -- Raymond Cummings

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!There may be no other contemporary player who’s logged as many miles, taken as many left turns, or made as many friends on his musical journey than Thundercat. The artist more prosaically known as Stephen Bruner began playing bass at age 15, absorbing the lessons of jazz fusion greats like Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, and Jaco Pastorius. He soon joined his older brother Ronald Jr. as a member of Suicidal Tendencies, serving the L.A. thrash-funk-metal institution for the better part of a decade, while still making time to tour with Snoop Dogg and build a rep as a session musician for the likes of Erykah Badu and Bilal. Even after Thundercat established his own flair for spaced-out, vanguard R&B with his debut solo album The Golden Age of Apocalypse in 2011, he continued collaborations with Flying Lotus on the Brainfeeder label and forged a new one with Kendrick Lamar. He and brother Ron were also a part of Kamasi Washington’s formidable group for The Epic.The influence of these past hookups are easy to hear in the astonishingly diverse sounds of Thundercat’s new album, Drunk. Yet the album contains fresh surprises, too. Appearances by Lamar and newbies Wiz Khalifa and Pharrell may not be so shocking, but who could’ve known that Thundercat’s allegiance to yacht rock was so fervent that he’d enlist Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins for cameos on the ultra-smooth “Show You The Way”? The album’s crackpot humor and abundance of short, weird tracks are equally suggestive of his devotion to Frank Zappa, and at some shows he’s performed a cover of “For Love (I Come Your Friend)” by George Duke, the R&B maverick who was one of Zappa’s best musical foils.Drunk could only be a product of Thundercat’s vast and vivid musical universe, one that we explore here via songs he’s either created or helped craft, plus equally vibrant tracks by other artists he’s covered, sampled, and loved.

It’s been 20 years since Wilco’s Being There seduced me in my roommate’s Ford Escort. This happened in the fall of 1996, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, just two hours northeast of Chicago. So yeah, the place was crawling with Midwestern college students all earnest and modest and way into Wilco, Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt, The Jayhawks and any other artist camping out halfway between alternative and rootsy. A fan of noisy underground rock, I tended to dismiss these bands — that is until I started borrowing Rob’s Escort to run errands: laundry, the bank, record stores, Smirnoff. The super generous dude said I could take it anytime, and I did. (I also devoured a lot of his groceries — sorry, man.) Why exactly I began listening to his copy of Being There — which had been out only a few weeks — and not one of the dozen other CDs strewn across the floor has been lost time. I’d love to say that I started the ignition one day and became instantly intrigued once the gargantuan, Flaming Lips-like feedback of the opener, “Misunderstood,” drenched the car. But that would be the kind of apocryphal crap music critics love foisting upon readers. Nevertheless, I started listening to the record and gradually became obsessed. It’s never left me. I know it forwards and backwards. I can recite the track list from memory. I appreciate other Wilco albums, but none even come close to blowing my mind like their second.From the little I’ve read about the album (I’m not lying when I say I haven’t read much about Wilco), Jeff Tweedy, Jay Bennett (RIP), and the rest of the crew harbored lofty themes about the complex relationship between rocker and fan when they began recording the sprawling double album in late 1995. You can hear them grapple with this idea on “Misunderstood,” written from the perspective of a fan, as well as “Sunken Treasure” and “The Lonely 1.” I didn’t know any of this when I first formulated my take on Being There, which is this: It’s an overly self-conscious rock album made by an overly self-conscious rock a band about rock, both its awesomeness and suckitude. It’s about how rock is totally weary, spent, and repetitive, yet at the same time utterly inescapable for those addicted to it. And since there is no escape, we might as well drink from that repetition — revel in it. As Tweedy sings on “Someone Else’s Song,” a slowly rolling folk number with a melody reminiscent of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” “I keep on singing/ You’re eyes they just roll/ It sounds like someone else’s song/ From a long time ago.”Wilco take the notion of singing someone else’s song as a license to wear their influences on their sleeves in a way that most bands would be too embarrassed to ever attempt. Many of these — early Little Feat, Neil, Gram, The Replacements, Big Star — are baked deep into the grooves. Others, in contrast, are shoved in listeners’ faces. Not only does “Misunderstood” lift The Lips’ uniquely groaning feedback, it actually contains lines — “Take the guitar player for a ride/ You see he ain’t never been satisfied/ He thinks he owes some kind of debt/ Be years before he gets over it” — lifted almost verbatim from Rocket From the Tombs’ proto-punk ballad “Amphetamine.” The rocker “Monday” boasts Keith Richards’ guitar tone from Let It Bleed and blaring horns from Exile On Main St. On the blurry-eyed ballad “(Was I) in Your Dream,” Tweedy sounds like a drunken Dr. John impersonator, while over the course of the fiddle jam “Dreamer in My Dreams” he mimics the raspy hellraising of Tex-Mex legend Doug Sahm (who recorded with Uncle Tupelo, incidentally).In addition to blatant plagiarism and mimicry, Tweedy works in all manner of historical references, some obvious, others oblique. In the folksy love ditty “Far, Far Away,” he slips in the phrase “on the dark side of the moon.” You can tell from his hesitant delivery that he totally knows what fans will be thinking when they hear him nick a phrase from Floyd. “Hotel Arizona” has to be a nod to “Hotel California” because the song doesn’t actually contain the phrase in the lyrics. Tweedy sings “hotel in Arizona” but not actually “Hotel Arizona.” Being There contains an “Outtasite (Outta Mind),” as well as an “Outta Mind (Outta Sight)”; both are basically different versions of the same song, just like how The Beatles included slightly different renditions of the title track on the art pop classic Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Ditto for Neil on Tonight’s the Night.)I freely admit that many of my references are wholly my own creation, and Tweedy probably would roll his eyes if he ever read this. Like a nutty conspiracy theorist with a wall full of photographs, pins, and yarn, I’ve constructed a map of the different rock coordinates that I’ve projected onto . The whistling closing out the richly melodic “Red-Eyed and Blue” is a nod to The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream.” “The Lonely 1,” a syrupy ballad about the rock ‘n’ roll life, is Wilco’s “Beth,” itself a syrupy ballad about the rock ‘n’ roll life. And best of all, the playfully walking piano chords opening “Outta Mind (Outta Sight)” are a secret love letter to the influence that “Sesame Street Theme” exerted on Tweedy as a child.Being There totally invites this kind of fanaticism, however delusional, from its fans. After all, only fellow rock fanatics — the kind that spent their teenage years picking apart every last lyric, riff, and fill on their favorite albums — could’ve recorded a set so absurdly referential. This is music by obsessives for obsessives. What started as a fling in a Ford Escort in the mid ’90s turned into a fascination spanning decades.

The Michigan-based duo In the Valley Below took their art to the next level in 2019, releasing the multimedia project The Pink Chateau, in which their sophomore full-length album serves as the soundtrack for a feature-length film of the same name, written and co-directed by the band’s singer and keyboardist Angela Gail Mattson. According to the duo, the film was inspired by vintage French erotica and follows the journey of an intimate meeting between two strangers. Their slinky, sulky alt-pop lends a tantalizing touch to the visuals, but it still holds its own intrigue, especially on dreamy downtempo tracks like “Rise.” Given their natural ability to set the mood, they seem like just the right people to put together an ideal soundtrack for a romantic dinner date.Say Mattson and bandmate Jeffrey Jacob Mendel of the playlist: “We like to listen to mostly instrumental music when we eat dinner. Something that goes with red wine or whiskey. Sexy with a few subtle surprises. Not distracting from conversation, but not boring. Soulful and inspiring. Playful with a hint of darkness. Something dreamy like Dorothy Ashby and her harp to Angelo Badalamenti and the familiar songs of Twin Peaks. Miles Davis’ simple haunting dual-note melody to the sunny gospel groove of Booker T. and The M.G.’s. This playlist is a collection of songs for our ideal evening of conversation and romance.”

Canadian/American singer-songwriter and poet Vera Sola (born Danielle Aykroyd, as in daughter of actor Dan Aykroyd) makes sorrowful and sweet country-tinged indie folk forefronting her sense of moody, mercurial lyricism and her rich, sonorous singing voice. Ironically, then, in this curated playlist, Vera Sola chooses to focus on songs where its the background vocals, whether through harmony or counterpoint or layering effects, that do the heavy work.Vera Sola says:"I’ve been haunted by this one sort of sound my whole life. For a while I wasn’t sure what it was. I’ve described it in the past as the tuning up of demonic orchestra. Or some kind of dysfunctional organ. The closest approximation I’d found, until recently, was a broken mellotron—the decaying of the choir tapes. But that still didn’t quite nail it. It wasn’t till I entered the studio to record my first album (Out now! Called ‘Shades’!) that I realized it was my own voice in harmony or discord with itself. Many tracks layered and panned and pitted against one-another.That discovery got me thinking about my particular love of songs that are "made" by their background vocals. Especially ones with backing vox or harmonies that don’t quite fit the mood of a song. Or arrangements that blend backgrounds with other sonic elements so they become as one. Or, even better, sound like or perform the function of other instruments entirely. Whether it’s a voice that sounds like a trumpet, or a deep growl that becomes percussion.This concept was built around my obsession with a song called El Pauling’s "Cool Teenager"—which employs a twisted choir to chilling effect, to kick the shit out of an otherwise pretty standard 50’s teeny-bopper tune. But gah! That’s been removed from Spotify! So go find it wherever you can.This is a playlist, that’s, like me, all over the place in mood and genre. But what the songs have in common is the wonder of whats going on with the human voices that arent right at the fore. Some of them are just straight-forwardly beautiful, or exciting, or just particularly moving. Others are strange, unsettling, confusing to the ear. What instrument is that? If it’s on this playlist, and you can’t quite pin it down, it’s probably someone singing.It opens and closes with the Mills Brothers, whose early records feature just one guitar—everything else is a humanvoice. Woven between the brothers you’ll find the masterful gang vocals of prisoners chopping wood on a Lomax field recording, the strange soprano counter-melody in Sam Cooke’s version of Summertime, some shape note singing, and the brilliant sampling of Bill Withers’ humming at the beginning of ‘Grandma’s Hands’ that makes up the backbone of 90’s classic ‘No Diggity.’ (Hip Hop and Rap artists took this concept to a new level—it felt overwhelming to choose, and worthy of a whole ‘nother playlist. Check out Wu Tang’s 36 Chambers for example, after example.) And then of course there’s the do-wop, the cowboy, the folk and its iterations, as well as some punk thrown in. I know I’ve left off so many. But Spotify’s lacking some key ones and I maxed out on songs. Got a particularly weird one I missed? Write me. Let me know."