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June 23, 2026 
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7 songs that spun my head around
7 songs, 21 min 58 sec
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| Rosalía’s dazzling Lux Tour hit Madison Square Garden last week. The New York Times |
Dear listeners,
Like the ode to serendipitous musical discoveries I sent out a few weeks ago, today’s playlist is a hodgepodge of my current sonic obsessions and enthusiasms. It includes a Rosalía song from an album that her spectacular Lux Tour inspired me to reconsider, a nearly forgotten late-70s new-wave band called the Student Teachers, two new songs (from Sylvan Esso and Julia Jacklin) that I think are worth your time, a satisfyingly faithful new cover by the country outlaw Johnny Blue Skies, and a pair of love themes from Hitchcock movies that I recently discovered and find tonally inappropriate in all the best ways. Enjoy!
This vertigo has me spinning like a top,
Lindsay
One Song I Enjoyed Live
Rosalía & Yahritza y Su Esencia: “La Perla”
A confession: In the eight months since its release, I have not returned much to the Spanish pop experimentalist Rosalía’s grandly ambitious “Lux” — an album that finds her singing in 13 different languages, contemplating the divine, and inhabiting the perspective of some long-dead saints and poets. I listened to “Lux” maybe twice when it first came out, recognized it as an impressively dense work that demanded time and attention to fully appreciate … and then I just never gave it that time or attention. Mea culpa. But some albums only really unlock for me once I’ve seen them performed live, and after catching Rosalía’s dazzling show at Madison Square Garden last Wednesday night, I can say that “Lux” is one of those albums.
The Lux Tour seamlessly merges ballet, opera and classical music (featuring a 20-or-so-piece orchestra on the floor of the Garden!) with pop-star spectacle and charisma. Rosalía’s dancing pivots gracefully among various styles, and her vocals are virtuosic in any genre. But what has stuck with me most in the days since the show is sus ojos: I don’t know if I’ve ever seen another musician on an arena stage who is able to convey such strong emotion through her eyes. They sparkled darkly, they glared with ferocity and, during her showstopping aria in “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti,” they brimmed over with tears. They also rolled ever-so-sassily during her playfully staged performance of this “Lux” standout, a kiss-off to an ex-lover that Rosalía introduces each night by inviting an audience member (usually a celebrity) onstage to spill their secrets in a Catholic confessional booth.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
One Excellent Discovery
The Student Teachers: “Past Tense”
Another fun thing I did last week was catch a screening of Philip Hartman’s great 1987 cult classic “No Picnic,” a restoration of which is currently playing to packed rooms at Film Forum. (It was supposed to run for a week but has now been held over for more than two months! That’s what I call an underground hit.) “No Picnic” is a beautifully shot, stylishly written time capsule of mid-1980s New York: rent strikes in the East Village, subterranean bars entered through sidewalk cellar doors, and (in a memorable scene seemingly shot surreptitiously from the stands of Shea Stadium) Keith Hernandez playing first base for the New York Mets. And fittingly, since the protagonist is a down-and-out jukebox repair man, it has a killer soundtrack, featuring Richard Hell (who makes a cameo in a role he was born to play: “Irate Neighbor”), the Raunch Hands and a band I was not familiar with until I saw the movie, the Student Teachers, a short-lived teenage new-wave group who met at a John Cale concert and played all those storied downtown New York clubs in the late 1970s. Shout-out to the person in the YouTube comments on the “No Picnic” trailer who identified this song that plays in it; I love that opening riff!
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Two New Songs I’m Digging
Sylvan Esso: “Hot Slob”
I had no idea the serenely blippy electro-pop duo Sylvan Esso could sound like this: sweaty, snotty and hedonistically brash. “Hot Slob,” a new stand-alone single, is an infectious and defiant ode to living messily and having nothing figured out: “And I drink like a fish, I still don’t know how to live,” Amelia Meath sings. “But I made it, can you hear it? Yeah, I’m living in the glitch.”
▶ Listen on Apple Music or YouTube
Julia Jacklin: “Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You Soon)”
Julia Jacklin, an Australian singer-songwriter with three incisive albums under her belt, has returned with this jangly and buoyant lead single from her upcoming LP “The Gem.” Recommended if you like: Sharon Van Etten, self-deprecating self-knowledge, song titles that make excellent use of parentheses. (Yes, there’s an Amplifier playlist about that, too.)
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Two Head-Spinning Hitchcockian Oddities
I recently finished (and loved) Steven C. Smith’s book “Hitchcock and Herrmann,” a lively and detailed study of the working relationship between Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, who probably gets my vote for greatest film composer of all time. Smith’s research gave me a new appreciation for Herrmann’s scores (he wrote seven of them for Hitchcock movies), but it also pointed me toward an absurd bit of Hitchcock musical ephemera that I didn’t previously know about but with which I’ve since become obsessed: The incongruously cheery theme song written for “Vertigo.”
Because of the promotional possibilities, studio executives often pushed Hitchcock to include pop theme songs in his movies. He relented for his 1956 remake of “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” and the Paramount songwriters Jay Livingston and Ray Evans wrote him (and the film’s star, Doris Day) an instant classic, “Qué Será, Será (Whatever Will Be, Will Be).” But they tried, and failed, to recapture the magic two years later when they were commissioned to write a snappy title song for Hitch’s latest masterpiece, “Vertigo” — a movie way too dark and creepy to warrant a straightforward love theme. (Hitch made the same mistake in 1964 when he commissioned a romantic titular theme song, to be sung by Nat King Cole, for what is perhaps an even darker movie, “Marnie.”) The big-band musician Billy Eckstine’s recording of “Vertigo” (sample lyrics, if you can believe it: “This vertigo is driving me insane, my love / This vertigo that has me spinning like a top!”) did not end up in the film, but Smith suggests, convincingly, that it just might be the inspiration behind the title song of Mel Brooks’s 1978 Hitchcock parody “High Anxiety.” You be the judge.
Billy Eckstine: “Vertigo”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Nat King Cole: “Marnie”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
… And One Great Cover
Johnny Blue Skies: “A Whiter Shade of Pale”
Earlier this year, Johnny Blue Skies — the nom de plume of the country iconoclast Sturgill Simpson — put out a rambunctiously funky album called “Mutiny After Midnight” as a physical-only release. On June 8, though, he finally released it onto digital streaming providers, so you holdouts have no excuse not to check it out. The digital version of the album also features a lovely new cover of Simpson and his band the Dark Clouds tackling Procol Harum’s 1967 classic “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” and nailing it. It’s not a radical reworking, but it’s a satisfying one: Simpson’s vocal is warmly impassioned, and that iconic Hammond organ riff is played with a reverent faithfulness. Let’s just say I prefer this to his cover of Eddie Murphy’s “Party All the Time.”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
The Amplifier Playlist
“7 Songs That Spun My Head Around” track list
Track 1: Rosalía & Yahritza y Su Esencia, “La Perla”
Track 2: The Student Teachers, “Past Tense”
Track 3: Sylvan Esso, “Hot Slob”
Track 4: Julia Jacklin, “Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You Soon)”
Track 5: Billy Eckstine, “Vertigo”
Track 6: Nat King Cole, “Marnie”
Track 7: Johnny Blue Skies, “A Whiter Shade of Pale”
Remembering Clive Davis
Yesterday the legendary music executive Clive Davis died at age 94. The breadth of his influence is perhaps best experienced by listening to this playlist that Rob Tannenbaum assembled, featuring some of the huge hits that Davis shepherded: “If You Don’t Know Me by Now,” “Blinded by the Light,” “Saving All My Loving for You” and “Smooth,” to name just a few.
As an executive at Columbia Records and later the founder of his own labels, Arista and J Records, Davis was known for his hands-on approach with artists. But, as Jon Pareles notes, Davis also knew when to give his more unorthodox artists ample creative freedom, as he did with Patti Smith on Arista. As Smith herself put it in 2007, in her Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction speech, “I had a lot of guts, not a whole lot of talent, but he had faith in me and let me go out of the gate, just a colt, and stayed with me.”
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