Artists

Birmingham, UK art-rock brooders Editors return with their sixth album, Violence, this March. To get you pumped up for it, the band has shared the music they use to get pumped up. "Music is a big deal in our dressing room. From late afternoon, on show days, we normally have the speakers set up playing a wide variety of records from varying genres and styles, both new and old. But it’s an hour before stage time where things really step up a gear, so the playlist I’ve selected here is a greatest hits of what we listen to before we walk out on to stage. Crank it LOUD."——Elliott Williams, Editors

In September 2017, Enter Shikari released their fifth album, The Spark, which saw the British post-hardcore experimentlists foreground the synth-pop sounds that have always been an undercurrent in their work. It’s a move that makes even more sense once you hear what the band were blasting this year. “For us personally, 2017 was a game of two very distinct musical halves. We started the year looking backwards and touring in celebration of 10 years since the release of our debut album, and then halfway through the year we released what we would consider to be our most forward-thinking music so far.“While we were putting our list together, it became apparent that it’s been a good year for great music. It’s probably been a good year for shit music too, but we haven’t been listening to that. It’s always amazing how some people can still release new music from beyond the grave. Still, were glad they did.“This is a list of music released this year that we’ve been enjoying, from the smooth tones of Brian Eno to help with mindfulness, to the big bangers like Astroid Boys.”—Enter Shikari

The biggest hit from Eric Church’s fifth album Mr. Misunderstood, “Record Year” continued the North Carolina native’s impressive run of singles topping the country radio charts. But it’s more than just a bittersweet breakup song, folding references to some of Church’s favorite music into a tale of getting over heartbreak with the help of a turntable. His heroes George Jones and Waylon Jennings get a namecheck, Willie Nelson’s landmark album Red Headed Stranger has a cameo, and progressive bluegrass cult heroes New Grass Revival get a shout out. Yet Church’s songs have always been rich with influences from outside of country, and James Brown and Stevie Wonder’s records get a spin as well.

Like this playlist? Love vinyl and jazz? Buy all the songs mentioned here and much much more on vinyl at Wayout Jazz.A musician’s-musician all the way through his brief but influential career, Eric Dolphy amassed a long list of guest appearances to help supplement his supburb solo albums. While most jazz fans know of his stints with both Charles Mingus and the John Coltrane Quartet, there remains a treasure trove of other collaborations that showed his true intellectual style and willingness to experiment based on nothing more than mutual respect of those artists whose visions he believed in. Don’t be put off if that sounds pretentious. He was not one to choose art over beauty, and time will reward repeated listens by exposing deeply emotional playing and thoughtful arrangements. -- Wayout Jazz

Keyboardist Erik Deutschs sound has been described as "a gumbo of American music that touches in jazz, blues, pop, funk and dub," and with his swirling new album Falling Flowers, that statement is definitely true. Touching on psychedelic and atmospheric, Deutsch traverses the realm of what a keyboard can do. An artist in his own right, Deutsch has also been backing up artists like Citizen Cope, Norah Jones, Alice Smith, Rosanne Cash and Shooter Jennings as well as touring regularly with Charlie Hunter throughout his career. Obviously a master of his craft, its no surprise he made a playlist championing his fellow keyboardists. Check it out here or hit play above.Says Deutsch of his playlist, "Hammers, Strings, Stops, & Knobs is my tribute to some of history’s best ticklers, plunkers, pounders, and tweakers of all things related to the undisputed heavyweight champ of western music: the keyboard. Every one of these essential artists holds a special place in my heart as the uniqueness of each of their musical voices exist on a level reserved for the very best (not to mention that these are seriously dope tracks!) So kick back, relax, and allow a hefty dose of keyboard wizardry to brighten up your day."

Ernest K. is a Nashville-based rapper who is deeply influenced by the Space Jam soundtrack and Eminem. The Dowsers recently asked him to make us a playlist. Here is what he gave us, in his own words:I’ve always loved a very wide variety of music. This playlist I’ve put together barely scratches the surface of all the music I consume and have consumed over the years. It’s a mix of some current songs I’m diggin’ and songs I loved growing up that helped shaped me into the artist I am today. So... roll sum .... or don’t... whatever floats your boat lol... kick back and enjoy.

Erykah Badu is this generations queen of soul. Her music is the sound of apocalyptic premonitions, bedroom recriminations, African headwraps, Rhodes keyboards, political claptrap, Nag Champa ashes, and dusty, broken breaks. It’s an oeuvre that is hypnotic, sensual and, above all else, iconic. It’s safe to say that Erykah from Dallas is an emancipation artist: She’s liberated the funk from soul, soul from the past, history from herself, and her audience from their seats. It’s a loopy, wrinkle-in-time logic: One of the foundational figures of R&B’s current futurist, post-everything heatwave is a woman who was considered a nostalgist when she first appeared 20 years ago.And if those mathematics are confusing, swiggle this: What artist, of any genre, has remained as consistently unpredictable or this fearlessly unremitting in her will to constantly redefine her sound for as long as Ms. Badu? If R&B is the lingua franca of modern music, then Erykah was the one who tagged the Rosetta Stone.But what are Erykah’s musical foundations? Luckily, that’s an immensely answerable question. She has always been generous in citing her various influences, and we’ve scoured various interviews, DJ sets, mixtapes, live setlists, and sample databases to compile a list of the tracks that made Erykah, Erykah. If you want to hear her best work, check out our Erykah essentials playlist here; if you’re looking to understand how she got here, this is the place to start.There are at least a few basic sensibilities at play in Erykah’s music. Funk is at the forefront, in various permutations, from the genre’s godfather, James Brown, to his various global descendents: Fela in Lagos, Maurice Washington in Chicago, Prince in Minneapolis, Zapp in Cincinnati, and Thundercat in Los Angeles. Brown’s “King Heroin,” which Erykah included on her phenomenal FEEL BETTER, WORLD! mixtape, features the godfather at his most pensive and mournful, calling for a “revolution of the mind”—another liberation of sorts—over a slinking, understated backdrop.There’s a similar sadness running through Fela’s “Army Arrangement,” which Erykah selected as part one of her favorite Fela tracks in an interview with OkayAfrica. The track was recorded in 1985, as Fela was facing concurrent five-year sentences for trumped-up currency-smuggling charges. After he was imprisoned in Nigeria, his record label gave the masters to Bill Laswell, who chopped up the track’s 30-minute length into something more approachable for Western audiences. "Listening to it was worse than being in prison," Fela quipped. Luckily, the full original version has been restored, and you can hear echos of the track’s loping, hypnotic funk throughout Erykah’s own work.But while funk may be the spoken undercurrent, it’s hardly the only note. Her take on interplanetary psychedelia is also present here. For her BEATS BEES LIKE FOR B-BOYS AND B-GIRLS mixtape, which premiered in 2016 on Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 show, Badu chose Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War.” Sun Ra, an afrofuturist pioneer, was perhaps most famous for claiming that he was an alien from Saturn on a mission to preach peace. “Nuclear War” is the apocalypse as a shuttling, chanted, obscene zen koan. This 11th-hour spiritualism is refracted through Erykah’s own shambolic, shamanistic 2008 masterpiece, New Amerykah Part One, an album that alchemizes the dread and loathing of George W. Bush’s second term. That album also famously sampled Eddie Kendricks’ moody “My People...Hold On,” a track that skirts the boundaries of funk, jazz, psych, and soul to craft an an ode to perseverance and defiance.And while the almost all of the selections here are culled from artists of the African diaspora, the exceptions are notable. For a Complex interview in 2015, she revealed that Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon taught her the value of “evolving through experimentation.” It echoed what she told Rolling Stone in a 2011 retrospective of the album, where she relayed being turned onto the Floyd in 1995 by Andre 3000. In that aforementioned Complex interview, she also names Joni Mitchell’s Blue as one of her favorite albums, saying that the Laurel Canyon icon has “one of the most soothing voices I’ve ever heard. The music is haunting.”There’s an underlying tenderness and intimacy in Mitchells work that informs both singers’ work, regardless of which genre the songs work within. It’s the same delicacy that informs many of her soul picks, from Stevie Wonder’s phosphorescent “Visions” to J Dilla’s ethereal “Bye.,” which chopped The Isley Brothers’ “Don’t Say Goodnight” to haunting effect. While no one one-ups Dilla, Erykah did her own impressive interpolation of the Isleys’ version of Todd Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me” for her 2016 hit collaboration with Andre 3000, “Hello”—a track that conveys the tenderness and warmth of those old friends and lovers.And, in many ways, that yin-yang dynamic—the balancing of intimacy, poetry, and grace with power, prose, and rhythm—sums up Erykah. She’s not only one of pop music’s most powerful artists, but one whose work channels the brightest and boldest impulses of the best popular music of the past five decades.

Cool things can happen when you turn a listicle into a playlist. Take Spin’s ranking of every Gn’R tune: As rock criticism, I wholeheartedly disagree. All 10 jams comprising the mighty Appetite of Destruction have to crack the top 15—yet only five do. In terms of listener experience, however, this anti-intuitive move pays dividends. With the ranking frontloaded with cuts off their other albums, the playlist winds up accentuating GnR’s under-appreciated diversity. For a bunch of Sunset Strip sleazeballs they covered a lot of terrain, from psychedelia to folk balladry and industrial. Only diehards will plow through the entirety of this admittedly immense playlist, but don’t be surprised if you come away with a markedly different perspective of these infamous rockers.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Joey Bada$$ emerged from Brooklyn in 2012 as part of a wave of New York teenagers—a.k.a. the Pro Era collective—who were reviving traditional hip-hop values. On his debut mixtape, 1999, he constructs songs with dense lyrical arrangements and beats from sampled loops and drum patterns. He raps about rocking stage shows and battling kids in other ciphers, two themes that haven’t been in vogue in mainstream rap since the mid-‘90s. A few of Joey’s song titles even pay subtle homage to old-school fare like Souls Of Mischief’s “93 ‘Til Infinity” (“95 Till Infinity”) and the illuminati fad (“Killuminati”).The narrative around Joey Bada$$ began to shift when his 2015 retail debut B4.DA.$$ (Before Da Money) debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard top 200 album chart, forcing rap fans who dismissed him as a niche backpacker to pay attention. (A widely circulated Instagram photo of Malia Obama rocking a Pro Era T-shirt also helped.) Then, last year, he released “Devastated,” an empowerment anthem filled with chorus and echo that foregrounds his singing while relegating ‘90s homage to the background. (There’s a brief flicker of the melody from OutKast’s “SpottieOttieDopaliscious.”)Bada$$ will never be confused with Wiz Khalifa, who forever reduces his bars in favor of a catchy hook. Joey’s new album, All-Amerikkkan Bada$$, shows how he’s managed to transform into something more contemporary—sharply assessing the political landscape on “Land of the Free” and trading bars with Schoolboy Q on “Rockabye Baby”—without losing the qualities that made him a star. The songs collected here chart his evolution.

The musical force of nature known as Ezra Furman returns this February with his most epic statment yet, Transangelic Exodus (Bella Union), a quasi-conceptual glam-goth-pop odyssey that he describes as “a queer outlaw saga.” Here, he reveals the influences that pushed the record to the next level. “These are songs I was into during 2016-2017 that made me want to turn the way I made music on its head. One develops a certain idea of what music is supposed to be and how it’s made, but the fact is, the possibilities are infinite—possibilities for songwriting, for arrangement, for editing and sound and delivery and combinations of ideas.“I’m not sure why, but a few times every year since I was 12 I’ve just heard something and said, ‘THAT. That is my future. That is what I need.’ It started before I even played an instrument. It was never (solely) about making the music, but about a way of thinking or being I could hear in a song. When you hear music that’s not like something you’ve heard before, you can sometimes intuit a whole different cultural and/or personal ethos from it. That’s what happened when I heard these songs, and I craved to incorporate some element of them into both my music and my life. Sometimes, it even happens with songs you’ve heard a million times, but that you just had never heard in that certain way before.“The Talking Heads’ and Nick Cave’s paranoia. The Mountain Goats’ and Lou Reed’s storytelling. The ear-candy pleasure principle of Vampire Weekend and Sparklehorse. The musical anarchy of Tune-Yards and Beck. It all got folded into my brain and pushed me toward Transangelic Exodus.“I’m so glad people write songs and make records. I’m so grateful for the work they put in to realize their mad visions. It’s like water to me. I need it to live. And I’m so glad I get to make my own as well.”—Ezra Furman