Rock + Alternative

The most striking vocalists have always had an otherworldly quality about them, from D’Angelo’s subverbal warble to angelic high tenor of Smokey Robinson. Thom Yorke is no different, and, like those other singers, he’s able to convey something deeply humanistic in his otherness. Stripped from the context of Radiohead’s heavily textured sonic experimentation, the beauty of Yorke’s voice is arguably more evident here. It’s also interesting how you can track the progression of modern alternative music through this playlist, how it evolves from the sadsack balladry of the late 90s and early naughts to the IDM-informed formalistic experimentation of the past few years.

Since 1989, Tim Burgess has been the frontman for Manchester rock chameleons The Charlatans UK. But in recent years, he’s enjoyed a second career as a globe-trotting DJ/label impresario/roving musicologist, recounting his adventures in twobooks. His latest album is Same Language, Different World, an electro-soul collaboration with one-time Arthur Russell associate Peter Gordon.“My playlist is made up of songs from the start of the day and the end of the night. Each morning, I post a Breakfast Banger on Twitter and some nights I can be found DJing—this playlist is the pick of those songs. But it might not be obvious which ones are from the day and which are from later. Enjoy!”—Tim Burgess

I add not a letter to the obituary that The Quietus published almost four years ago. These days I’m kinder towards Transformer and listen to Ecstasy a couple times a year (listen to the widescreen canvas given to “Big Sky” by Hal Willner).Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

North Dakota singer-songwriter Tom Brosseau’s latest album, Treasures Untold, features a handful of orginals alongside renditions of classics from the Great American Folksong Book. Here, he takes us deeper into the roots of American music, while spotlighting some more modern interpretations thereof. “Lately I’ve been listening to the Peter Rowan catalogue, who Sara Watkins recommended to me in the early 2000s. ‘Panama Red’ appeared on both Rowans first solo album, Peter Rowan (1978), and before that in 1973 on the New Riders of the Purple Sage album The Adventures of Panama Red. I would say the ‘Panama Red’ here, recorded in 1994 at Telluride, finally found its true pulse. It displays the master musicianship, in both control and tone, of not only Peter Rowan, but also his band of A-list bluegrass players.“I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine, music historian Lou Curtiss. I phoned Lou about the omitted material from the Carter Family On Border Radio series. If there were any unreleased Carter Family recordings out there I wanted to know about it and Lou would be the person to talk to. Lou proceeded to tell me a story concerning the 16" transcription discs that eventually became On Border Radio, and how they were discovered in Baja, California, but so often when talking about music with Lou it’s like swinging from one limb to the next in an endless jungle. You go awhile; there doesnt have to be a real destination. Lou and I derailed from the Carter Family to the Phipps Family, a musical group you might say picked up where the Carter Family left off, in the 1940s. Thanks to Lou, who always gives me such great musical recommendations, I have become a Phipps fan. I hope you will too.“There’s an album of Harry McClintock entitled Haywire Mac. It’s educational and so much fun to listen to, recorded by Sam Eskin in 1953. It features McClintocks story-telling, his biographies on songs and people, and of course his singing. (McClintock composed many songs, most notably “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”, a staple of the Great American Folk Songbook.) One composition on Haywire that I really love is ‘Sweet Violets.’ It’s an example of what’s known as a mind rhyme. You’ll find a more risqué example of a mind rhyme on this playlist. You’ll know it when you get to it.“This playlist is comprised of songs that either I stumbled upon or were recommended to me. It’s perfect for a small gathering, like a dinner party. Or take it on a walk with you. It doesn’t matter how you come across music. All that matters is what touches the heart. Enjoy listening.Photo: Lizzi Brosseau

Whats This Playlist All About? As he prepares for the release of his new solo album, The Atlas Underground, the Nightwatchman, former Rage Against the Machine guitarist, and outspoken activist continues to fight for his rights through music. His genre-spanning list hits up all types of subversive anthems and calls to action from punk icons, pop freaks, and folk heroes.What You Get: To start, youll be treated with a good chunk of Morellos new album, including a grungy, hard-rocking cut with K. Flay and a sludgy, bass-y banger with Knife Party. He then gives shout-outs to his friends and collaborators, like Skrillex, Vic Mensa, A Perfect Circle, and System of a Down, before taking many left turns, including a little Jesus Christ Superstar, a club-ready 50 Cent, and a sassy Taylor Swift.Greatest Discovery: The woozy, dreamy, twang-touched "Song for Zula" from the criminally underrated PhosphorescentWhat About Rage? Theres one radical band conspicuously missing from this list: Morellos own Rage Against the Machine. A little "Killing in the Name" would round this out nicely, right?

For the past three years, I’ve been impressing people—hell, impressing myself—with the fact that I’ve been to Tom Petty’s house. I’d gone to Malibu to interview him for UNCUT magazine about Hypnotic Eye. Admirably raucous and rancorous, it proved to be his final studio album with the Heartbreakers, the band that he fronted for the better part of 40 years. So that album’s mostly what we talked about in a room next to his studio, which he’d built next to the rambling, Spanish-style, and thoroughly unpretentious home he bought after an arsonist set fire to his place in Encino in 1987. This one nearly burned down too, thanks to the massive wildfires in the area in 2007—as we chatted before sitting down, he pointed out the window to the spot a little higher up the hill where the fires stopped short of his property and the Pacific Coast Highway just below. The house is where he was found unconscious and not breathing after his cardiac arrest early Monday morning. I remember the room in the studio as homey—I could imagine Bob Dylan here with his boots up on the sofa, checking out the tasteful black-and-white framed photos on the walls. (Tom was onstage with his hero Roger McGuinn in one; with his fellow Wilbury Roy Orbison in another.) Petty served us coffee from a big stainless steel urn into oversized southwestern-style mugs that I imagined he washed himself because he didn’t want the pottery to get fucked up in the dishwasher. Throughout the interview, he puffed on a vape pen before rewarding himself at the end with a genuine smoke from a pack of American Spirit. Sporting a big bushy beard along with his usual straggly blond hair, Petty had the tanned and weathered face of an old Florida beach bum, but his bright blue eyes made him look younger by 15 years. He was friendly and a little crotchety—in other words, he was as cool as you could’ve hoped. We were supposed to have an hour but he gave me two. Then he walked me back to the front of the house and got on with his day.So that’s the scene I’ve been replaying in my head since I heard the news. Somehow, our afternoon together—and its complete lack of the audience-with-a-rock-star bullshit you might expect—speaks to the Everyguy/no-bullshit/scrappy-kid-from-Gainesville thing that Petty always exuded. He was a man of the people in a way that Dylan and Springsteen couldn’t be, because they just seemed too oversized, too mythic, too huge from the get-go. Like the characters he tended to write about, Petty was always somewhere between underdog and self-made outcast. Yet the chip on his shoulder was the rare and beautiful kind that seemed to make him more empathetic to people rather than less so. Anyway, that’s what I hear in the songs that I go back to most—some are hits and others are deeper in albums that didn’t quite get as much love as they should’ve (like the Heartbreakers’ final two albums, Mojo and Hypnotic Eye). Petty’s pair of albums with the reconstituted version of his proto-Heartbreakers band Mudcrutch proved that the man never lost his songwriting chops even if the snarling, punk-ass Petty of 1978’s You’re Gonna Get It and 1979’s sublime Dawn the Torpedoes was always gonna be hard to outdo.When we spoke, Petty talked about his plans to do an expanded version of his Rick Rubin-produced solo masterpiece Wildflowers from 1994. He didn’t get a chance to realize that ambition but in 2015, he did a preview of sorts by putting out a previously unreleased song from the sessions called “Somewhere Under Heaven.” A deceptively simple vignette that movingly portrays the bond between a “working-man” dad and the daughter who’s too young to know how bad the world can be, it’s arguably as fine as anything he ever wrote. In the last verse, the father has this to say to his little girl: “One day you’re gonna fall in love/ One day you’re gonna pay the rent/ Hold on to what love you find/ You’re gonna need all you can get.” Feels like good advice right now for all kinds of reasons.

In 1999, Sigur Rós’ Ágætis byrjun bewitched a surprisingly broad swath of music lovers with its heavily textural, exceedingly patient approach to orchestral art rock. But hidden within the gossamer folds of that gorgeous album was something even more novel: lyrics sung in the band’s very own made-up language, Hopelandic. Though indistinguishable for most fans from the group’s native Icelandic, this idioglossia became an attractive part of the Sigur Rós mythos—elaborate world-building is, after all, catnip to pop-culture obsessives (shout out to the MCU).As it turns out, Jónsi and co. were neither the first nor the last to experiment with bespoke jargon. Not all have taken it as far, but some have gone farther: ’70s French prog-rockers Magma record exclusively in Kobaïan, a language from a fictional planet that was apparently also visited by Japan’s ’80s-founded Ruins, who howl in a Kobaïan derivative. New ager Enya adopted her Gaelic-inspired “Loxian” after singing in Elvish for The Lord of the Rings. Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard sometimes slips into a vocabulary she says she shares exclusively with God.On the chiller end of the spectrum, you’ll find Elton John and Talking Heads employing fake speech in Dadaist thought experiments. And off-kilter interpretations, like Tom Waits grunting in German-esque on “Kommienezuspadt,” or Italy’s Adriano Celentano aping American English on 1972’s “Prisencolinensinainciusol.” There’s a lot of quasi-Latin chant out there, but there’s only so much meditation music one playlist can handle, so we skipped some of those songs to make room for a little novelty: Lin-Manuel Miranda rapping in Huttese, and a certain gang of yellow fellows covering the Village People.

When I was a 13-year-old girl completely oblivious to the immense power of femininity, Tori Amos "God" struck something within me. "God sometimes you just dont come through / Do you need a woman to look after you?," she trills with a mix of steeliness and sass. Perhaps its the blatant heresy she so coolly savors, but that line continues to sting so good, as long as religion and patriarchies continue to dominate our existence. Over two decades and some 15 albums later, we expect nothing less from Amos, who keeps writing, recording, and touring relentlessly; slipping in and out of personas; and crafting her art on cosmic concepts that intricately break down life here on Earth in all its bliss and terror.Amos is a carefully constructed contradiction: a classically trained musician and provocative pop star; a ministers daughter with an angelic voice and a wildly wicked sense of humor; an independent woman who respects tradition as much as she subverts it. For this Family Tree feature, we honor her musical lineage, whose roots stretch back to Lennon and Led Zeppelin, then branch out to Fiona Apple and PJ Harvey, and continue to flourish through artists like St. Vincent and Lorde.

THE ROOTS

At the ripe ol age of two, Tori started playing piano. Soon, she was on scholarship at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore. But she found her greatest muses in the rock records her older brother would sneak into the house. Led Zeppelins sticky, swampy pagan rock would leave an impression, especially those Robert Plant wails that effortlessly ooze with sex. So would the fabulous flamboyancy of Freddie Mercury—you can see his histrionics channeling through her when she works two pianos at once in concert. In fact, shes even claimed Mercury wrote her To Venus and Back track "Sugar" from beyond the grave. Shes said the same about John Lennon, whose ghost may or may not have helped write the Boys for Pele song "Hey Jupiter," whose chords mirror another rock god: Prince.Of course, there are plenty of rock goddesses tangled among Amos roots as well. Her most ethereal proclivities bring on constant comparisons to art-pop auteur Kate Bush, who can draw sensuality out of the steeliest synths. Stevie Nicks is another one of her spirit animals, and Tori covers her Rumours material often. But perhaps her most striking trait—her raw, vulnerable songwriting—draws from the beautifully raging poetry of Joni Mitchell and punk priestess Patti Smith.

THE BRANCHES

Tori Amos released her debut album Little Earthquakes in 1992. At first blush, her flowery, flowy piano rock seemed a far cry from the testosterone-fueled grunge blowing in from the Pacific Northwest. But her songwriting and delivery, stripped bare of pretense and posturing, shared much with that genres tortured confessionals. At the same time, her music felt like an antidote to all that muscular angst, even though anger and pain very much powered her own cathartic cries. This potent femininity would quickly seep its way into the alternative-rock consciousness through prolific artists like PJ Harvey, Liz Phair, and Ani DiFranco.Songs like "Silent All These Years" would help give voice to equally strong, immensely gifted women armed with a piano or guitar and a helluva lot of thick skin. On “Sullen Girl,” Fiona Apple channels her own trauma as a rape victim into one of pop music’s most hauntingly elegant depictions of the terror, depression, and isolation that comes with such hell. And, like Tori, her words flow so eloquently, so naturally, with every little waver in her voice holding infinite emotion. But it wasn’t just women who felt her allure. Trent Reznor was also a fan, and the two were often linked. Tori’s “Caught a Lite Sneeze” references Pretty Hate Machine, while “Past the Mission” features Mr. Self Destruct himself on backing vocals.

THE LEAVES

Twenty-five years after her solo debut, Tori continues to reinvent herself as she navigates a contemporary landscape rife with musicians influenced by her. These artists capture her passion, her freakiness, and her luminous grace in their own lucid tales that often shift and warp modern ideals of love, sex, power, and gender. The weird, snarling dance mix of Tori’s "Raspberry Swirl" could work as a rough template for St. Vincent’s wacky, whimsical compositions. Traces of her most mystical odysseys weave through the dark, eerie dream-pop of Bat For Lashes and Zola Jesus. Provocative piano women like Amanda Palmer take a bit of Tori’s unapologetic fire and let it loose themselves, too—heck, Palmer is even married to author Neil Gaiman, the subject in a few of Tori’s songs. And even some of pop’s biggest stars embrace Tori’s insatiable need to articulate the immensity of being a powerful woman. Just take it from Lorde: “I’m 19 and I’m on fire.”

Before Tracy Chapman came along, 1988 sure didnt seem like it was waiting for her. Remember, the U.S. had been through two terms of Ronald Reagan, and the sense of American entitlement (or at least white American entitlement) had reached toxic levels. The "greed is good" era was in full swing. Conspicuous consumerism had become a virtue, if not a requirement. It felt like the entire country had taken a worrying swing to the right.The album charts, airwaves, and MTV rotation were overloaded with bigger-is-better hair metal and synth-swathed, hi-tech dance pop. Nobody was expecting an androgynous young African-American balladeer with an acoustic guitar to bring back Americas social conscience and rise almost overnight from obscurity to iconic status.But when Tracy Chapmans self-titled debut album arrived, packed with undeniably urgent tunes that could only be classified as protest songs, it was as if the world suddenly realized it had been nursing a Chapman-sized void for years, which was finally being filled. And the world responded in kind: a No. 1 record all over the globe, an armful of Grammys, a Top 10 hit with "Talkin Bout a Revolution," and saturation of just about every arm of the media, from magazine covers to radio playlists.Though nobody had heard of Chapman before April of 88, by September she was co-headlining Amnesty Internationals Human Rights Now! tour, alongside socio-politically savvy rock titans like Springsteen, Sting, and Peter Gabriel. But the force of her songs, sound, and persona made it impossible to imagine any other scenario.In the year of "Dont Worry, Be Happy," here came a forthright troubadour with a force-of-nature voice delivering songs about domestic abuse (the chilling, a cappella "Behind the Wall"), the harsh realities of American poverty ("Fast Car"), the madness of materialism ("Mountains O Things"), worldwide injustice ("Why?"), and of course, the long-overdue arrival of a political sea change (the rabble-rousing"Talkin Bout a Revolution," which proudly proclaimed, "finally the tables are starting to turn").Sure, an eyeblink later we had The Indigo Girls, Melissa Etheridge, et al. But when that first Tracy Chapman album burst into being, it felt like something unprecedented was happening, or at least something the likes of which the nation hadnt seen since the days of Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs more than two decades earlier. And it was lost on no one that this charge was led by a sexually ambiguous woman of color in a time when a doddering, reactionary white man defined Americas image.30 years after Chapman first made her mark, the U.S. finds itself at a troubling juncture once more, a time when an alarming number of citizens have swung to the right yet again, and all the social ills of the 80s are threatening to take up residence in the heart of America again. If Tracy Chapman were making her debut now, when theres such a grievous crevasse in our nations liberty, she would probably be described as "woke."But Chapman was woke long before that colloquialism ever even existed. If songs like "Fast Car" and "Talkin Bout a Revolution" were unleashed for the first time in 2018 instead of 1988, theyd feel just as much like a desperately needed breath of clean, fresh air. In fact, if you dust those tracks off and take them out for a spin right now, youll find that they still speak to the state of things with just as much resonance as ever. And while its a shame that theyre still so necessary, its a blessing that theyre still so unshakably powerful.

Veteran Scottish alt-popsters the Trashcan Sinatras recently celebrated their 30th anniversary, and to mark the occasion, theyre embarking on a special acoustic tour of intimate venues (like, house-show-intimate, in some cases) across North America this fall. To get into the mellow mood, theyve made us this playlist of unplugged classics by the likes of The Beatles, Paul Westerberg, Vashti Bunyan, and more.