How do you demonstrate the craft of crooning? It brings a broader range than you imagine. After the many nominations springing from last week’s topic, defining as all about style and using the microphone, guest playlister ParaMhor brings some perfect performance picks …
Read moreMicrophone closeness? Songs featuring crooners
This week it’s time to to get close to the microphone explore the evolution of crooning in the full range, the style, the technique, the good, bad and ugly, emotive, intimate and excellent, the creative, the cosy, and the cringeworthy, the sensitive and sentimental
Read morePlaylists: songs with conditional phrases
Where will it all lead? What are the conditions? Are they zero, first or second? All the ifs and thens are revealed in these wittily entertaining lists compiled by guest Severin, inspired by songs nominated in last week’s opening topic of 2024
Read morePlaylists: songs for fictional commercials
Awash with ads for travel, clothing, leisure, painkillers, marijuana, vegetables, and even items to boost sex life? Well, it’s time to be entertained by a string of non-existent ones, framed in snappy marketing musical form, with playlists picked by guest magicman from last week’s topic
Read moreRevealed! Lesser-known original songs more famously covered or reworked
This week it’s time to dig deep for those original songs overshadowed by hit or well-known covers. We can also include remixes and other reworkings, as well as lesser known songs so heavily sampled they make a prominent core more famous version
Read morePussy-footing? Perhaps it's songs about indecision. Is it?
From the many various situations and vacillations of love to shopping, voting, moving or staying and more, it’s finally time to plump for indecisiveness on song lyrics. The choice of what to nominate is yours. If you can …
Read moreThese foolish things: songs about memorabilia and souvenirs
Whether music, sport, film, travel, or wider culture, they mean different things to different individuals, but all are items that trigger or preserve memories, personal or more universal. Let’s explore these specific objects in song, overall or in specific lyrical detail
Read morePlaylists: songs about the vertebral column and neck
Lumbar numbers to vertebral verses, it’s time to run all the way up the spine to the nape of the neck in playlists that place all those discs without a single slip, musically massaged and written about by guest Loud Atlas from last week’s topic
Read morePlaylists: songs and music featuring the double bass
Supportive thrum, steady walking or free-flowing virtuosity, smooth or thumping, bowed or plucked, this big daddy of the stringed instruments is a beautiful beast, especially in these playlist plucked out by Loud Atlas from last week’s topic
Read morePlaylists: songs with music as nutrition
Some music feels so good you can just eat it. With a whole shopping spree of tasty ingredients and treats about the nutritious benefits of song, guest of the week ParaMhor prepares a three-course meal that’s bound to boost your health
Read moreA spectacle of canticles: songs about eyewear
They correct or protect our vision, but can also change our appearance. But what do they signify and what happens to the wearer? Form distance to reading glasses, sunglasses to goggles to monocles, it's time to see how they look in lyrics
Read morePlaylists: songs about punctuality
Something changed around the Enlightenment, with the advent of universal timepieces, but how did that affect human relationships? Inspired by last week’s nominations, Marco den Ouden clocks in with perfectly timely playlists
Read moreSweat bands: songs about perspiration
As heatwaves spread around many parts of the world, it’s time to turn the perspiration into inspiration. Sweating covers many contexts, from work, to exercise, fear to sex, but how are its process and emotions expressed in song?
Read morePlaylists: songs about higher education and graduation
Applications have been made, papers marked, but from last week’s many entries, which made the grade and will reach graduation to make the playlists? Examiner Marco den Ouden reveals the full results …
Read morePlaylists: songs about sisters
Deep affection, solidarity, loyalty, but also a variety of bittersweet melanges, this week, after a tsunami of perceptive suggestions, guest of the week George Boyland picks songs of deep emotion and variety that sing out for the sister
Read moreWanted, dead or alive: songs about outlaws and rebels
Catch this if you can. It’s time to stand, or sit, and deliver. Figures real or fictional, outlaws or those against the establishment, or the spirit of rebellion in all forms, let’s explore this primal instinct in myth, romance and fact via story and song
Read morePride playlists: songs about gender and LGBTQ+
Coded 30s black blues to a 1950s Mexican diva, 1970s and 80s politics to full on out dirty disco in 2021, this week’s guest playlister Pop Off! celebrates a personal birthday with Gay Pride parade that goes beyond the obvious anthems
Read moreOut of their time: original songs with a striking retro style
This week we look back to look forward with artists who wrote new songs with a style from the past, ignoring their zeitgeist and harking back to a former era or decade though musical stylings, choice of instruments, lyrics and more
Read moreCan you pull this off? Songs about underwear
Descriptive, metaphorical, sexy, suspenseful, comical, funny, sensible, functional, or filthy, it’s time to rummage though your musical unmentionables, big up the smalls, fill out those bras, slip on those slips, and disc jockey up your shorts …
Read moreSound waves and signals: songs about body language and gestures
Involuntary or practised, revealing or hidden, this week from waving to winking, leaning the lying, aggression and domination to love and tenderness, let’s look out for songs that express these gestures in titles or lyrics
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