Artists

If you’re a fan of excellently crafted folk-rock and you’re not spinning Bidin’ My Time, Chris Hillman’s first album in over a decade, you have to change this. Featuring fellow former Byrds Roger McGuinn and David Crosby, the nostalgia-kissed collection very much is a meditation on The Byrds’ unique legacy. When you really think about it, the breadth of recordings linked to everybody who passed through the Byrds between 1964 and 1973 is downright astonishing—in addition to those already mentioned, there’s Gene Clark, Gram Parsons, Clarence White, and roughly a half-dozen others.Crosby, for example, is a key link between the folk-rock boom of the ’60s and the following decade’s singer-songwriter movement. After all, on top of co-founding the supergroup CSN(Y), he produced Joni Mitchell’s debut, Song to a Seagull, and provided harmonies to Jackson Browne’s masterfully minimal 1972 self-titled album. At the same time, cosmic American music pioneer Gram Parsons—who helped turn The Byrds into a country-rock outfit with 1968’s Sweetheart of the Rodeo—was equally active, helming two pivotal groups in the International Submarine Band and The Flying Burrito Brothers (the latter with Hillman and original Byrds drummer Michael Clarke). He also partied hard with Keith Richards and, as legend has it, sings backup on “Sweet Virginia,” the drunken, shit-kicking anthem from Exile on Main St. Even a lesser known Byrd like Kevin Kelley—who filled the drummer’s chair for most of 1968—really got around. Before joining The Byrds, he played with the Rising Sons, an absurdly ahead-of-their-time blues-rock act co-founded by Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, while afterwards he appeared on The Yellow Princess, an album from American primitive guitarist John Fahey, and did some recording with the mystical, singer-songwriter visionary Judee Sill.As one would expect, such an expansive lineage reaches clear across the rock music spectrum, yet as our playlist captures, there are several central themes running throughout The Byrds’ universe. Revisit their original albums (even the spotty ones have moments of sheer brilliance), and what you’ll notice is the music rests upon a cluster of overlapping tensions: tradition versus futurism, earthiness versus the cosmic, simplicity versus virtuosity. After all, here is a band that within a span of 12 months in the 1968 zone explored abstract synthesizer music (“Moog Raga”) and covered The Louvin Brothers’ Southern gospel tune “The Christian Life.” Yet oftentimes these tensions can be found in a single song, like how their landmark version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” wraps pastoral folk balladeering in the crisp, soaring aesthetic of the jet age or the way the late guitar genius Clarence White shades the John Coltrane-inspired psych-rocker “Eight Miles High.” Check the live version from 1970’s (Untitled) with mind-bending solos grounded in his scorching bluegrass picking.Jump to the seemingly endless network of solo albums, projects, and guest appearances spawned by The Byrds, and the very same tensions pop up. The epic “Some Misunderstanding,” from Gene Clark’s 1976 spiritual masterpiece No Other, sounds like country-rock—if it were recorded inside a black hole. Though not nearly as dark and brooding, The Flying Burrito Brothers’ “Sin City,” one of the landmarks of cosmic American music, also achieves a sublime balance of rootsy twang and spacey splendor. And then there’s a piece like “Have You Seen the Stars Tonite” from Paul Kantner and the Jefferson Starship’s seriously underrated Blows Against the Empire; it may only be tangentially related, yet it does feature Crosby’s high, ghostly voice and ethereal strum in service of a song that uses folk-based music as jumping off point for some galactic-scale rock.Over 50 years after The Byrds first took to flight, these tensions still grip them. Simply check out the sublime version of Gene Clark’s early composition “She Don’t Care About Time” on Hillman’s Bidin’ My Time. Everything about Hillman’s version—his dusty, time-weathered voice, the simple, heartland arrangement and throwback guitar jangle—reflect a man looking back on life and embracing his mortality. And yet, if you dig into Clark’s esoteric poetry, it’s a whole other story: This isn’t a mere love ballad; it’s a near-religious meditation on the infinite and universal. Perhaps the reason why The Byrds have meant so much to us through the years is this singular ability to, however tenuously, bring the earthbound and heavenly closer together, even if only for a song.

By 1998 Public Enemy were history if not, in the words of “Brothers Gonna Work It Out,” his-story, especially in the year when Lauryn Hill and Missy Elliott were writing and producing their own hits. No less than reading The Devil Finds Work, my listening to Fear of a Black Planet gained from a culture’s sense of its canonicity and from the manner in which it distinguished itself from the Puff Daddy and RZA era of hip hop multiplatinum.Too black, too strong, Public Enemy’s work through 1994 mashed bewildering verbal dexterity and an ever-permutating instrumental bed that chopped up two decades’ worth of R&B and scored it to the symphony of tea kettle whistles. They’re exhausting records; listening to Public Enemy is difficult. Their albums don’t work as background music. I’m grateful to Chris Weingarten’s entry in the 33 1/3 series, a book devoted to It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, for the reasons mentioned above an album too abrasive and, well, historical to reach younger ears, as I’ve learned in recent years. Thanks to an ethos that prizes brothers working it out, the core of Chuck D, Flavor Flav, and intermittent collaborator Professor Griff don’t give much cop to women (“She Watch Channel Zero?!” misunderstands women and TV; deserves appreciation anyway) and sneer at faggots (“Pollywanacraka”). But “Pollywanacracka” unfurls as a polyphony: spoken-word cross-gender arguments over James Brown, Rufus Thomas, and Diana Ross samples that take at least a half dozen plays to suss out — and recontexualize. “All the associations that a listener may have with an existing piece of music are handed down to the new creation,” Weingarten wrote.I’m sorry to say that after He Got Game my concentration waned until 2007’s spare, contained How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul?, which I admired long before “Harder Than You Think” became the highest charting single in England as a result of 2012 Summer Olympics exposure. I’ll take any early Bush II era recommendations.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

There were two things we were looking forward to in 2018: Robert Mueller indicting Donald Trump, and Migos releasing Culture II. After all, Migos has been at the forefront of pop music for the better part of this decade. If we’re being 100% honest, we’ll admit that we dismissed them as one-hit wonders when “Versace” first dropped in 2013, even if we kept it in rotation for a long minute. But they’ve proven much more resilient, creative, and influential than we ever imagined. “Bad and Boujie” and “T-Shirt” helped get us through the past year-and-a-half of this orange-stained apocalyptic shitshow, and the first Culture felt like a coronation not only of Migos as the kings of hip-hop, but also of a new generation of hip-hop stars. So we just assumed Culture II would be like Easter with triplet flows, pinging trap beats, and wealth-porn punchlines.We can’t blame Migos for taking a victory lap, but, at 24 songs stretching nearly two hours, Culture II feels like a victory slog. There’s some hot tracks——“Stir Fry,” “BBO,” and “MotorSport” are all career highlights——but there’s a lot of bloat. Whether they did this because they lacked any sense of quality control (sorry), or because they were trying to game the streaming system, doesn’t really matter to us. The fact is, it gets tedious.So we’re asking you, our loyal readers and keen discerners of good taste, to help us make Culture II great again. Please, EQ the speakers, stake out the X-Actos, and carve out the amazing, taut album that we feel is lurking in there somewhere. You can see how we’d cut this up in the playlist above, but we want to hear your version, too. So, visit our Facebook post here, post your tracklist and Spotify playlist link in the comments, and/or give the thumbs up to the other version you like the best. We’ll feature the winning version of Culture II on our homepage and in our social feeds, attributed to you. Playlist away.

Captain Beefheart was a man, but also an idea, and to write a straightforward piece about him here seems antithetical to his essence. He had a mustache sometimes and other times he had a goatee; sometimes he wore a fedora and other times he wore a cowboy or top hat. Despite having no musical training, he played numerous instruments. Occasionally, he composed at the piano, which he did not know how to play. He was friends with Frank Zappa, who produced Trout Mask Replica. His music is indisputably its own strange amalgamation, but it was still as directly tied to the confusion of the ‘60s as any music ever was, fusing blues, beat poetry, jazz, rock ‘n roll, psychedelic, noise, and avant-garde. His voice was almost magical and he could shift between gravelly falsetto and rumbling baritone at the drop of a harmonica. To try to make sense of Captain Beefheart is pointless, and furthermore, it goes against his very being. Sure, he can be understood as a social phenomenon, but this playlist isn’t about that. It’s called “Captain Beefheart Insanity.” Just go with it.

During Car Seat Headrest’s meteoric 2016 ascent, various fans and critics tried to pin down the band’s sonic DNA. An obvious touchstone was Matador Records mid-90s golden era—the hushed/clanking dynamic of Yo La Tengo and the absurdist suburban ennui of Pavement are both evident—but there was also strands of polished ‘90s alternative rock in the album’s clean and at-times intricate production. “Sounds of Denial”—the Spotify playlist that band braintrust Will Toledo posted around the time of the album’s release—features “songs that are responsible in some way for the creation of my new album Teens of Denial.” It’s a surprisingly broad playlist that leans very heavily on the rock canon, beginning with The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and continuing with tracks by the likes of Queen, Nirvana, The Clash, and Rod Stewart. You’d like to imagine your indie rock heroes being inspired by something a bit more obscure and idiosyncratic than “Maggie May,” but there’s also something oddly appropriate about it. After all, much of the charm of Teens of Denial was a sense of teenage nostalgia, and the album perfectly captured the boredom of hazy drug-fueled days spent listening to classic rock radio and gazing into the abyss of disposable relationships and strip malls. This playlist captures that, to some extent, even if it’s largely inessential listening.

In 2015, Caribou famously posted a 1,000-track mixtape that served as a journal of his musical discovery over the past few years. It’s a lot to digest, to say the least. The Canadian electronic artist has omnivorous taste, for one. New Wave freakout king Gary Wilson bumps up against a particularly eerie track from jazz icon Nina Simone. There’s disco legend Cerrone on the groovy “Got to Have Loving” and also lots and lots of Velvet Underground (of course). You don’t have to make sense of any of it, of course, but, if you squint just so, you can piece together Caribou’s own aesthetic roots.The squiggling synth lines, and bouncy beat of “E.V.A” from Moog pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey reflects Caribou’s own tendency to reconcile more experimental strains of electronic music with an overarching pop sensibility, while the hanging-off-the-bone, mandela hip-hop of Madlib is a natural fit for an artist who started his career focused on lo-fi psych sounds. The delicate, understated intensity of Caribou’s most recent album, 2015’s Our Love, is captured in tracks from Radiohead, Koushik, and Shuggie Otis, and house and disco-derived sounds figure in heavily—in addition to Cerrone, the playlist also contains Sylvester, Derrick May, Moodymann, Larry Heard, and Chez Damier—which tracks nicely with Caribou’s own pivot towards more dance-friendly beats for his Daphni project.The original YouTube playlist was nearly one hundred hours of unsequenced music (in the note that came with the mix, Caribou suggests that it be listened to on shuffle), and it’s obviously sprawling. Even in this slightly abridged Spotify version—presumably, the 204 tracks not included here weren’t cleared for digital music services, sadly—it’s easy to get lost. Ultimately, this feels more like a radio station than a “mixtape” or a playlist. The listener lets it spin passively in the background, occasionally swooping in to figure out who exactly is doing what. The contextual editorial information that Spotify offers comes in handy—YouTube provides no similar key, and you’re constantly flitting between Google and YouTube to discover who the hell is Asa-Chang (a Japanese percussionist and leader of the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra) or Hal Blaine (Phil Spector’s go-to drummer). But this isn’t really an academic course as much as it is a party, or a celebration of the scattershot, sublime aesthetic of one of indie music’s most vital and unpredictable artists.

American-born, Oslo-based dream-pop chanteuse Carmen Villain recently released her mesmerizing second album, Infinite Avenue. To mark the occasion, she created this playlist for The Dowsers. Here, she explains its unifying theme: "This is a collection of abstract and cosmic jams, recent obsessions, and inspirations. Some of these I listened to a lot during the album recording process, some of the tracks are by brilliant friends and collaborators, others are more recent discoveries, or older favorites that have resurfaced to the front of my collection again. Usually, Im drawn to music where theres a kind of magic between sounds, something that might not be audible, but maybe felt more. I think most of these tracks have that."

At a time when US-Mexico relations are strained, theres fortunately indie-pop fusion ensemble The Chamanas spreading their homegrown sound from both sides of the border. Hailing from Juarez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas, the band has just released their album NEA II, featuring some of their first ever English-language songs. In mixing Spanish and English-language music, the collective aims to bring their varied musical culture to all people all over the world. As NPR explains, "The bands name is a alternative vocalization of "shaman," a spiritual person with healing energies. The Chamanas is definitely living up to the name." We asked them to put together a playlist for us, and taking another queue from their lifestyle north and south of the border, they chose some songs to play when driving the I-10.Says the band: "One of our favorite things to do is to road trip along the I-10 or el hay ten and visit new places along with our best friends/bandmates. We really enjoy playing in front of new crowds, and feeling the feedback from them listening to us for the first time. Our musical influence varies, just how the culture in the border can vary too. The four of us come from very different backgrounds and hence different musical influences. Still, we enjoy listening to music on the road together. We can jam to classics like Bronco and Jeanette, or new artists we just discovered and want to share." Listen above or go right here.

To state the obvious, Chance the Rapper is a good emcee! The Chicago rapper has a nice, soft voice that telegraphs his “boy next door” charm. He mixes up his flows from verse to verse (and, sometimes, line to line), so things never get monotonous with him. And while he’s not a syllabic-stacking, thesaurus-thumping rappity rapper like a Kendrick or Nas, he’s able to draw thematic through-lines through his tracks and (especially) albums that give his work a narrative focus and arc. In short, he’s more of a performer than a technician -- which is awesome -- and, to be a little more abstract, he’s more of a feeling than he is a place, and that feeling (joyous, personal, a little pious) defines his tracks.This works perfectly marvelous for his own music, but it can make his guest verses hit or miss, but, when the energy works and the vibes align, it’s awesome. Kanye West basically fashioned much of his 2016 album The Life of Pablo around Chance’s swaggering choirboy euphoria -- Yeezy even began to adopt Chance’s trademarks yelps -- so Chance feels more than at home on the deconstructed gospel of “Ultralight Beam,” and the lumbering, twilight R&B of SZA’s “Child’s Play” mines much of the same quixotic nostalgia that framed Chance’s 2016 album Coloring Book.This, of course, requires some alignment or compromise on the part of the hosting artists, but as Chance is a marquee star, and a guest spot from him is becoming increasingly coveted, more artists are willing to go there, which is just fine with us.

In an era where taking ownership of and proclaiming faith in one’s own project seems a rarity, Chief Keef’s confidence in his own work and that of his friends is a breath of fresh air. When asked by Complex to list his favorite songs, he submitted a list almost exclusively of his own music. He justified this by pointing out that the meaning of each song is communicated in the title of each song, and the list ends up reading like more of an OKCupid “About Me” than a list of favorite songs. An interesting aberration here is “Gucci Mane’s Entire Catalog,” although Keef gives a bit by disclosing that his favorite Gucci song is “Spanish Plug.”