ANNE MARIE TO STEPHEN:

AM: What is your favorite song?

SB: Elliot James Reay, just take my money now. But don’t think I didn’t see you all the way in the back Vaughn.

AM: Have you heard any of these tracks before?

SB: Nope.

AM: What’s one song you expected to be on your Spotify Wrapped playlist, and one you never saw coming?

SB: Man was a really hard year for Wrapped for me because I listen to so many albums all the way through. The only thing I love more than finding a new song that I like is finding the corresponding album and realizing it’s a zero skipper. So a lot of the songs on Wrapped were expected because I wore out some albums. Stephen Sanchez. Conan Gray. The Last Artful, Dodgr. Teddy Swims. Augustine. Heather Russell. Maeta. The Thing. Empire of the Sun. Young Gun Silver Fox. So multiply each of those by 12 songs per album and that’s your Wrapped list. If there’s one song I knew would be on there (because it was my favorite song of 2024), it was Love Raider by DE’WAYNE. I will say that because Spotify cuts off in November for their Wrapped data, the songs that usually surprise me are the ones I listened to last December and had forgotten about. Loser by Jake Wesley Rogers was that for me.

STEPHEN TO ANNE MARIE:

SB: What is your favorite song?

AM: Howling by XG.

SB: Have you heard any of these tracks before?

AM: Zero.

SB: One of my favorite things in music (which is also extremely difficult to pull off successfully) is when within a song there are several distinct chapters that feel very different from each other yet work seamlessly to tell a story. Take Kamikaze by Magic Cities Hippies. The first two thirds of the song have this sauntering beach vibe and then around the 3:45 mark it transitions into this psychedelic trance state from which a new melody and rhythm emerge that can only be compared to Bobby “Blue” Bland’s Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City. Do you have any favorite songs that do this?

AM: My mind immediately went to Franny by MCH as well. Ra Ra Riot (shout out Syracuse!) did that some, too, back in the day but now I can’t remember which songs. Sleepy Head by Passion Pit has some unexpected shifts in it that could have gone sideways but ended up really hitting the hipster Brooklynites in the right way. Then of course my mind goes to jazz and thinks, oh, jazz artists probably did that first and best, and I think of Jeep’s Blues by the Duke.