NPR Music - The Contenders, Vol. 16: Jay Som, Jeff Tweedy, Kassa Overall, more

Episode Date: July 22, 2025

Can music save the world? The songs in this week's mix consider the power of creativity as we update our running list of the year's best tracks, with new ones from Jay Som, Jeff Tweedy and more.Featured artists and songs:1. Jay Som & Jim Adkins: "Float," from 'Belong'2. Google Earth (John Vanderslice & James Riotto): "meow meow," from 'For Mac OS X 10.11'3. Goon: "For Cutting The Grass," from 'Dream 3'4. Jeff Tweedy: "One Tiny Flower," from 'Twilight Override'5. Kassa Overall: "Rebirth Of Slick (Cool Like That)," from 'Cream''All Songs Considered' 25th anniversary segment: Our No. 1 songs from 2021Weekly reset: Twilight at Nags Head, with crickets and barking dog in the distanceEnjoy the show? Share it with a friend and leave us a review on Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts. Questions, comments, suggestions or feedback of any kind always welcome: [e-mail] Hear new songs from past episodes in the All Songs Considered playlists in Apple Music and Spotify.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

I don't know, man. Let's listen to some music. Music. Music's pretty good. It's all songs considered. I'm Robin Hilton, NPR Music Editor Sheldon, Pierce, here. Hey, Sheldon. Hey, Robin.

Can I start with a callback? You can indeed. I thought we'd start with a callback because I've actually been thinking of you. I'm touched. I've been thinking of you because do you remember when you played this song on the show? I think it was back around the end of April or so. indeed I do something I've been

want to tell you for a long time it might hurt you hope you don't lose your mind Miles Caten I just got goosebumps hearing this again genuinely the song I lied to you and I've been thinking of you

in this song because I finally saw the movie sinners it's come to streaming so yeah you didn't have to worry about taking the kids to the theater Right. They would not have watched that movie. But the thing is, you know, when you played this song on the show, you said it comes at this pivotal moment in the movie. Yeah.

But you didn't tell me what it was because you didn't want to spoil it for me. I'm so glad you didn't. Because it really is. It's just a special sort of crescendo to everything that's happened. And then it really just sets the whole plot in motion. It's one of those moments in a movie. I was trying to think of some other example. But, you know, when a film takes this really big, wild, weird swing and goes in some completely unexpected direction.

Yeah. You know, like I was thinking, like, maybe in the movie Magnolia. I don't know if you've seen Magnolia, but, you know, there's this moment when it starts to rain frogs in the city. And everyone, all the different characters in the film are in different locations and different points in their life, but they all start breaking into song and singing the same song. Yeah. And it could be so dumb, but for some reason. it works and becomes brilliant.

That's sort of like this moment. It's so wild in this movie. And I only want to tell everybody about it, but I can't spoil it for everyone either. Yeah, all you need to know is that up until that point, you think you're watching a certain kind of movie, and then this happens, and you are watching a completely different movie.

But we're actually here to talk about some newer stuff that's out. This is a contenders episode. We keep a list all year of our favorite songs, and on these contenders episodes, we update that running list with the latest tracks that we love so much that they could end up on our best of 2025 lists when we get to that point. Sheldon, what's popping for you this week? Yeah, after six years, J-SOM is back. She's got a new album called Belong, and the album's lead single features Jim Atkins of Jimmy Eat World. It's called Float.

Man, just for a minute there. It was like the early 2000s again and I was at some stadium show with, you know, like Death Cab or something like that. And can that just be like the mantra for the world right now? Can we all just float and not fight? It would be nice, wouldn't it? Yeah, I mean, if you think about her music before,

it's more in the indie pop, maybe even like dream popish ring sometimes, but you see a song with Jim Adkins on it. You kind of get a sense of where it's going. Right. The full thrush of this is like very much pop punk catharsis. Like it's got that big release of the hook. Even there's this lovely moment towards the end.

A little moment of quiet before the final chorus, the eruption of it. It's just so satisfying. Yeah, I don't know how many times I'd have to spin the dial before I'd come up with the right. This is not a pairing you would have imagined before you see it with your own eyes. Right, you know. They worked so well together, and I hadn't really clocked the similarities between J.Sum and Jimmy Eat world, but you, I mean, you hear it. It's just that the power pop guitars and the super hooky course.

Also, I think, you know, they both share a very foundational sound and idea in that, you know, where euphoria and melancholy kind of collide. Yeah. Yeah, there's a, there's a bitter sweetness to this song. Well, this album, Belong, it is out October 10th and that song float. Are you a John Vanderslice fan at all? Have you followed him? I'm familiar with a lot of his work. Yeah, yeah.

I haven't listened to a lot of his solo stuff. Yeah, well, he's a Hall of Famer for me. Right, right. I mean, he is, you know, he's got a fairly vast catalog as a solo artist now, because he's been doing this for a good 25 years or more. But he's got this relatively recent project that he's been doing. and the name of their band is really quite something. The name of the band is Google Earth.

Google Earth. Perfect. And they had a debut album out just last year called Street View. They're back with a follow-up album already. And the name of the album they've got coming out is also quite something. It's called For Mac OSX 10.11. Google Earth is the band, the album for Mac OSX. 10.11, and the first single that we're getting from it is called Meow Meow.

So many cool little sounds to get lost in. That's John VanderSlyce singing on lead vocals. You know, he's always leaned into, you know, maybe more experimental directions with his music. But I love this because I think it kind of pushes it all just a little more in those curious directions that I like. A little more warped. And then the little things like the piano that you hear at the end kind of keeps it all just grounded. Yeah, I mean, this project is clearly a love child of like longtime studio guys. Yeah, definitely. They're very clearly bouncing a lot of ideas off of each other.

I'm just really fascinated by the shifts and turns that this song takes. It's almost an important lesson in sort of like both repetition and progression because there's only one line of lyrics in this whole song that has repeated the whole time. I can't help you forget anything. But how deep can you go on that one little line though? Oh, that's the thing. So it's every time you hit it becomes like its own little mom. the more it plays, they keep pulling at it.

And as you sort of dive deeper and deeper with this lyric, everything around it is changing. It's growing. It's shifting. Yeah. So some people may be asking, how is it that they can name themselves Google Earth and name their album for MacOS X 10.11?

I think the answer is they cannot. And I think that they're just sort of waiting. to see what happens, you know, like, is anybody really going to, you know, is Google really going to go after these two guys? I was trying to think of some other examples. I remember Dan Deacon had a Twitter account called eBay Netflix, was the name of his Twitter handle. I tried finding other bands that did something similar.

I found a whole bunch of things like bands named after cars, R.O. Speedwagon, DeLorean. So this new album from Google Earth, again, it's called for Mac OSX 10.1. and it is due out August 29th. August 29th is when that's coming out. All right. Coming up on the show, Stephen Thompson, we'll be back to talk about our number one songs from 2021, going all the way back to 2021 for that one. This is something we've been doing at the end of every show or nearly every show this spring and summer as we celebrate the 25th anniversary of all songs considered. That's coming up, plus your weekly reset, so keep listening for all of that. but Sheldon what else you got for this week well you know they say don't judge a book by its cover

but I say maybe the same doesn't entirely hold for music because there have been a lot of times where I press play on something strictly based on the cover and sort of was profoundly rewarded I'm really trying to figure out where you're going here and with this but go ahead and that was the case with the band Goon and its new album Dream 3 which was painted by the frontman Kenny Becker it's very very Very busy. A rainbow splashed across a cloudy blue sky with a green body of water below, like sort of scattered with sparkly objects. Pleasantly, the album was as busy as the cover. And my favorite song on this record is the dreamiest. It's called For Cutting the Grass. You don't hear quite as much at the end of this song. But overall, I love how sludgy it is. It's very, very, very murky. That's what drew me to it.

Yeah, I mean, it's a sound that I want to say is very 90s. It's got a bit of a slacker thing going on that I'm always going to go for a bit. I think there's a lot more going on in it than that. The slackerness drew me in, the sludge. Any guitar you could describe as scuzzy, I'm there for that right away. But there's also just so much sort of like subtle motion in it. The reason I brought up the album artwork is because Becker said that he wanted the art to embody the same. approach that they took with recording.

And so the still lifes are like cut out and arranged as if they are stickers on a larger canvas. I think of this song being almost collage-like in the same way. Those guitars don't really erupt until like two minutes into the song. Yeah. It keeps shifting around. Yeah. You can't really get a sense for them.

And then the last minute of the song is just no lyrics, just totally free flowing. So I read that this wasn't the record that Kenny Becker set out to me. Yeah, this is in the middle of this process, his life took a pretty dramatic turn and his marriage ended. And so suddenly he's sitting in the worst feeling he's ever felt and having to finish this record. I think... Did he scrap everything that he was doing and start over? No, he just continued on with the process. The record is very chaotic.

So this album, Dream 3 from Goon, that's out now. That's out. Yeah. And that was the song for Cutting the Grass. You know, we sometimes lead off the show with the big questions or recurring themes that come up in these songs. We didn't flag them this time. But one big one, I think, is the idea that making art and being creative, that that can save you. Yeah.

Just how being a creative, curious person can help you. and others, kind of find a way out of a funk or a crisis or find clarity, maybe just be a really great distraction. And I think that that is a thread that is running through a lot of the stuff we're playing this week, but particularly in this new Jeff Tweedy album that was just announced. Jeff Tweedy, of course, of the band Wilco, he's got this new solo album coming out. It's a triple album, a triple album, nearly two hours of music. Yeah, it's massive. It's called Twilight Overrack. ride. He released four songs right away, right when he announced the record. And the one that I want to play is the one that opens this whole project. It's a song called One Tiny Flower.

That's it. We don't need any more music this year. No more, no more music needed. I think it's all covered in this one song. You know, this song and really the whole album from Jeff Tweedy, it's very much a response to our times, the feeling that he and a lot of people have just anxiety and anger and fatigue, just feeling spent. And, you know, the world has been upended and doesn't make sense anymore. And it's him pushing back. with a kind of defiant joy, it's him trying to manifest it. You really hear it at the end of this song, you know, where everything's getting more and more chaotic. He's like, I'm trying so hard. I'm just going to skip over this one little tiny flower growing out of the crack in the sidewalk and everything's going to be okay. Yeah, there's a line from the bio that really stuck out to me that he wrote where he said, here are the songs and sounds and voices and guitars and words that are an effort to let go of some of the heaviness and up the wadage of my own. my effort to engulf this encroaching nighttime nightmare of my soul.

And I'm just like, the idea of playing your way out of existential crisis is fascinating. Yeah. And then you listen to a song like this and you're like, okay, he's holding it together pretty well. Pretty well, but he's got all these wonderful hints of how broken the world is. And, you know, it sounds like it's a very simple little image. She's kind of taking a walk through his town and jumping over a little flower. But all the stores are closed, right? He mentioned shops that are closed.

You can tell that things aren't right. Right. Yeah, there's the outside world is mangled and destroyed. But I think what I really appreciate about this is the world inside is bringing him comfort. I think that's the whole idea behind this project. His son, Spencer and Sam, planting across this record, including on this song. And it just feels like jams amongst family and friends. Like, we're holding it together as a unit. Like, everything out there might not be great,

but in here, we can be there for each other. So this triple album from Jeff Tweedy, again, is called Twilight Override. And it is out in September, September 26th. All right, we've still got our number songs from 2021 coming up. Stephen Thompson will be back for that, along with your weekly reset. But Sheldon, you've got one more cut you want to play. Yeah, it's sort of funny that you talked about sinners and the Miles Caten song because the last song I want to play sort of

gives me a similar feel to essentially what that song is trying to say in that movie. Ideas about like connection across time, like old sounds and culture, sort of extending into the present and those two things being

connected in a way that is sort of inextricable. Haasa overall, you know, the jazz drummer and band leader who has spent sort of his... A rapper. Occasional rapper as well. Has spent his entire career sort of straddling the worlds of jazz and hip hop. His new album is called Cream and it takes rap songs from The Notorious B.I.G, Wutan

Klan, Dr. Dre, a tribe called Quest and others and sort of arranges them as jazz. Yeah. He said the album is almost a boomerang response to everything he's done before. because it's got no edits, no overdubs, no samples or drum machines. And the song I want to play is his take on Rebirth of Slick Cool Like That by Digable Planets, the jazz rap group that sampled Art Blakey

and the jazz messengers stretching. So it's like... Tentacles. You've got a bunch of sort of coiling, interrelated songs. Jazz turned into rap, turned back into jazz. There's this, like, very fascinating transmutation process that is happening here.

When I listen to this, if you don't know the context of what he's doing on this record, it sounds like it's just straight up jazz. Right. I mean, are there no vocals on this record at all? I haven't heard the rest of it. Yeah, it's literally jazz interpretations of rap songs. And once you're keyed into that distinction, you can hear him sort of mapping out. His version across their version of a classic.

So the song Rebirth of Slick, cool like that, is for, from the album Cream from Casa Overall, and that is coming out on September 12th. So we'll go out on this. We keep listening after the song, Stephen Thompson, we'll be back to talk about our number one songs from 2021. That's part of our ongoing celebration of the show's 25th anniversary. That's coming up after the cut, along with your weekly reset, so keep listening.

And Sheldon Pierce, thanks for hanging out and bring in the good stuff. It's always a great time. All right, we've been ending every episode this spring and summer by looking back at our number one songs from across the years. We started with the year 2000, and we're all the way up to 2021 now. And Stephen Thompson back as always. Hey, Stephen. Hello, Robin. So we're in the home stretch here all the way up to 2021.

We're only going to 2024, doing the first 25 years of all songs considered, starting with 2000, and then going up to 2024 through 2024. for 2025 TBD. But let's look at 2021. What do you think of with music in the year 2021? Should be a lot easier now. Well, do I pick my favorite song of 2021? I bet I know what that is. Or do I pick the song that most embodies 2021?

Because, you know, 2021 still deep pandemic. Yeah. Still, you know. Well, we're starting to get all the stuff that everyone made during 2020. Right. Yeah. You're starting to get. pandemic culture. You're starting to get like culture that is not only something that we,

that we enjoyed and processed during the pandemic, but works that are about the pandemic. So what do you want? Do you want my favorite song or the song that most embodies 2021? Let's go with your favorite song because I bet I know what it's going to be. Oh, I'm not sure you do. Okay, it's not what I thought it was going to be. I'm not going to get this. This is Jasmine Sullivan from her album Hotails. The song is called The Other Side. And it's just a fantasy about making it big,

but through another person. And it's a really hauntingly beautiful song. Her phrasing is just brilliant. It's one of the best R&B records of the 21st century. And a song that I just kept coming back to again and again. Well, so, were you, isn't that the year Hard Drive, like Asandra Jenkins, came out?

2020, 2021? It absolutely is. And maybe that's my favorite song 2021. Well, I thought maybe that's the song that you think maybe spoke to the Times more than the others.

And then my other option for you would have been Amy Sharks, Amy Sharks. That's a great song. That is a terrific song. We also didn't mention Silk Chafon by Moona. I could have, oh man, I could have gone in so, so many directions.

So what's the song that you think spoke to the times the most? Well, that would be this. Stunning 8K Resolution Meditation Is this Obernham? Yes In honor of the revolution

It's half off at the gap Deadpool's self-awareness Loving parents Harmless fun The backlash to the backlash To the thing that's just begun I don't know the song though There it is again, that funny feeling.

That funny feeling. There it is again. That funny feeling. Is it called That Funny Feeling? Yeah, that's That Funny Feeling by Bo Burnham from his Netflix comedy special inside, which was a comedy special he recorded entirely inside his house. as he's sort of coming unglued by the isolation and the anxiety around the pandemic. And it's really, to me, the towering example of kind of the best of pandemic isolation entertainment,

like works that were created of and for that moment in history. And that song in particular is really kind of summing up that sense of overwhelm. Well, I have one that speaks to all of those things and themes that you just mentioned. Is it Butter by BTS? It's not Butter by BTS. I love that song. This is a song that I remember when I heard it. I just bawled my eyes out because it was so beautiful.

And I remember thinking, Song of the Year. I'll be very curious to see if you get this. When did it happen? I still can't recall it. Life wasn't enough until after I typed it. Tell me a story. secret I still won't believe it

till after you shot it till you make it public Is this Elizabeth in the catapult? Yeah, I mean, she just said her name. She said her name is Elizabeth And I'm like, she does, this does sound like Elizabeth in the catapult. I am just fine.

Texting without feeling the song without meaning a dog without speaking to get a little. Together. I don't know if I was still following everything they were putting out in 2020. Well, that's the thing. Like, at this point, she'd been putting out music for 20 years, you know.

Some really great stuff. Great stuff. And then she drops this album called Sincerely E. And it has this song called Together Alone. My brain is connected to my hand is connected to my phone. Wide my photo of a wedding or a picture perfect tone. In the evening of your... sleeping my brain is connected to my hand is connected to my phone so much of it is just her and her piano

but like the lyrics in this song are just all about my brain is connected to my hand is connected to my phone one more photo of a wedding or a picture perfect tone it's just so it's it's heartbreaking it is just so crushing it's so beautiful I just think she so perfectly captures just that whole era of being alone, doom scrolling on your phone, wanting some sort of connection with the outside world and unable to reach it. She called this whole album, Sincerely E. She called it a love letter to everyone who's been stuck at home and who was stuck at home and struggling during that time. And yeah, probably my favorite song of the year. heartbeat. Do you ever think that you're too young to be complaining about your memory?

So much we could talk about, but we'll go out on this. And until next time, thanks, Stephen. Thank you, Robin. And for NPR music, I'm Robin Hilton. It's all songs considered. I've wondered, does your potential make you feel bitter? Throw your computer in the Hudson. Next to my hand is connected to my phone.

There's no it stops anymore. Next big thing. Always searching for that new beginning. So we're missing that we miss out on the kiss you're about to give me now.