NPR Music - Our no. 1 songs: 2018

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

An Afro-futurist universe with funk and lots of theater (and a big nod to Prince), a potent, political gut punch from a beloved actor and comedian, era-defining protest anthems and more.  Note: This is a recurring series in celebration of All Songs Considered’s 25th anniversary. A shorter version of this episode ran earlier in the year.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

It's All Songs Considered. I'm Robin Hilton, and all year long we've been celebrating our 25th anniversary by looking back at our number one songs from across the years. We're doing a different year each week. Stephen Thompson here. Hey, Stephen. Hello, Robin. So we are up to 2018, and we've been playing a little bit of name that tune. We each play a song for each other, and we see if the other person can remember it. I think you mentioned at some point along the way here. Hopefully, it will be recent enough that it won't be that hard. for us to guess what it is. We are up to 2018. I think I might know what you're going to play, but why don't you go ahead and tee it up and hit it and I'll see if I've got it right. Oh, man, there's a lot to choose from this year.

I'm going to go with this one. All right, it's Prince. Yeah, right. Janelle Monet. Correct. But I can't get the song. You'll definitely get it. You'll get it before the chorus.

for you yeah baby don't make me spell it out for you you keep on asking me the same questions why and second guess in all my intentions should know by the way I use my compression that you got the answers to my confessions make me feel

yeah I'm like I'm pale gender, sexual up mess make me feel What a great pick. Oh my gosh. This record. And remember, this album came out, you know, in the first half of 2018. Prince died in 2016.

And I think it was able to tap into not only this great leveling up and this great mission statement for Janelle Monet as this remarkably inventive, versatile kind of polymath actor, singer, shape-shifting musical superstar, but it also tapped into a little bit of the huge reservoir of love for Prince that everyone was still feeling in the aftermath of his death. Yeah, it hadn't even been like, what, like a year and a half or something? A year and a half.

And so I think in many ways this was like the perfect album at the perfect time. I thought you might go with the one that I'm going to end up playing now since you didn't do it. Oh, I think I know where you might go with this. Okay, let's see. Childish Gambino, This is America, the other song I was considering for this moment. We've been talking along the way as we've been going through each year about how impossible it is for us to be remotely comprehensive about all the great stuff that's coming out and all the important stuff. I would say that it is impossible for us to really have an adequate conversation about this one song in just a couple of minute exchange about it because it to me is just a staggering, important work of art on so many different levels. But I remember when this came out, you know, Donald Glover, who's childish Gambino, I had just spent however many years watching him.

I'm on community. On the TV show community. Yeah, and just hilarious, right? He's so funny. A lot of the rap and stuff that he had done was always full of all these jokes. It was like, I never really took him very seriously as a musician or an artist in that way. He was just a comedian to me and a very sharp, sharp wit, very funny, smart guy. And then this comes out and you realize, oh, these waters go very, very deep.

Yeah, and it's another song kind of like the Janelle Monet where the timing of it. Yeah. That came out in 2018, you know, amid very turbulent times in America. And that song, I think, really spoke to a lot of people and spoke to the moment in ways that I think, I think a lot of people right now are looking for music that is speaking to this moment in maybe the same way. and it's hard to find, at least in what passes for the monoculture. Yeah, and well, and the vision that he had in this song, there are so many different things that he sort of takes on in this one song,

from, you know, poverty to violence to guns and everything, all those really big, massive topics that he takes on, and just the clarity of vision that he has through this whole thing. I think it's safe to say that everyone was really surprised by this, and I have seen online video, of people watching the video for this and reacting. Like, people are going like, yeah, yeah.

What? Oh, my God. Yeah, reaction videos. All right, we'll take a quick break here and then talk about some of the other stuff that takes us back to 2018. So, Stephen, when we were talking about the childish Gambino song,

you talked about how, you know, that really spoke to the times when it came out. 2018 was also the year that Milk, the singer Milk, released the song Quiet. So if you remember this was a song, it had this really big viral moment in 2017, a year earlier, when Milk and a whole bunch of other people sang it, sort of a flash mob, singing the song on the National Mall, here in D.C. during the Women's March.

But that came out in 2018? But she ended up releasing it in 2018. It was on the album, This Is Not the End from Milk. And, yeah, a song that just really resonated back then, and I think still does. But what else were you thinking for 2018? Well, it's also, we haven't mentioned, I mean, we've mentioned her in previous years, but Casey Mosgraves put out Golden Hour. Oh, right.

In 2018, ended up winning album of the year at the Grammys was kind of the culmination of her rise, you know, just kind of putting out this brilliant incisive country music that really reached well beyond country. Like calling that a country album is a stretch. You know, it is a psychedelic folk record in a lot of ways, but kind of a perfect record that really summed up a lot of what she'd been trying to do. Another one of my personal favorites from 2018 was the debut album from Fox Warren. It was a self-titled album.

have that song Everything Apart. This is a band fronted by Andy Schauff. All these little sonic flourishes and cool sounds to get lost in the song and across the album. This song in particular, I think it's got a pretty wild beat. I think it might be 3-4 set against 4-4. It's like two different things happening at the same time. But yeah, I love this one so much. And, you know, as the years passed, it was starting to look like

we weren't going to get any more music from Fox Warren that this was just sort of a one-off thing. But then this year, they came back with their second album. It's just called 2. Seven years after the first one. I was very excited for it. A whole bunch of other stuff I could mention. from 2018, Tierra Wax Pet Cemetery.

Meg Myers had that song, Taring Me to Pieces, I really loved. Right. Robin, Robin had the song missing you from her first new album in eight years. At that point, it had been eight years since her previous album, and she just announced her first new song in seven years just this past week. We could just keep going, but what else? Oh, my God, Lucy Dacus Night Shift. Oh, gosh, that was, oh, yeah.

That was 2018? Sure was. Yeah. nine to five so I'll take the night shift and I'll never see you again if I can help it. In five years I hope the songs feel like dedicated to new life. Not a bad year for music, no. We could just keep going here but this is a good one to end on from Lucy Dacus. But until next time, Stephen, when we talk about 2019, thanks as always.

Thank you, Robin. And for NPR music, I'm Robin Hilton. It's all songs considered.