We spend all day thinking about new music—it’s at the heart of what we do here at Pitchfork. But the folks who comprise our staff are, like many of our readers, huge music nerds who like to look back as well as forward when it comes to discovery. Streaming services and YouTube have made it even easier to fall down a rabbit hole of a vintage variety, the sort previously reserved for crate diggers. At times this seemingly infinite access can feel overwhelming. So while it’s the time of year to take stock of what’s happened so far, we figured we would also shine a light on the old songs our staffers have found and loved in 2016. There’s no rhyme or reason for many of these finds, though a number of them happen to come from the 1970s. Maybe you’ll find something you also love, or simply be reminded that it’s a great time to look back as a listener.
You can also check out our picks as Spotify and Apple Music playlists—scroll to the end to stream from this window.
Jillian Mapes: “Some Folks’ Lives Roll Easy” — Paul Simon
Privilege was not a concept tossed around the mainstream much in 1975. The systematic reasons why white people, particularly men, are ahead in the world were not acknowledged then as they are now, and as they ought to be. My mind wandered towards this thought a few months ago after I bought Paul Simon’s (low-key excellent) 1975 album Still Crazy After All These Years at a sidewalk vinyl sale and subsequently became obsessed with the album cut “Some Folks’ Lives Roll Easy.” The song is incredibly self aware in its candor, as much of Simon’s best solo work is. He’s essentially saying, I know many others have it much worse than me, for reasons that are out of their control, so I have no business coming to God with my problems—but I find myself with my hat in my hand, in need of the Lord’s ear.
Maybe Simon didn’t have race explicitly in mind when he wrote it, but there’s no way he’s not talking about class—and it’s impossible to really talk about the class system in America without addressing the role of race, though plenty of people ignorantly did just that 40 years ago. Simon takes these concepts surrounding privilege and strips them down to the empathy of the human experience, then introduces his own faith. It’s a deceptively complicated mix of ideas that owes something to the country songwriting tradition, which Simon echoes in the sound. Still Crazy finds Simon embracing the era’s country-rock, never more so than on “Some Folks Lives’ Roll Easy,” where a twinkling guitar twang meets saccharine strings. It’s a little dated-sounding, yes, but I can’t shake the feeling that Simon was onto something timeless here in his humbled sentiments.
Mark Richardson: “Ha Po Zamani” — Miriam Makeba
Here’s how music discovery can work for me in 2016: I’m in Academy Records in Brooklyn on my lunch break, flipping through the new arrivals. I see an album by Miriam Makeba called Pata Pata that looks to be in good condition and costs $6. I see that it was released on Reprise in 1967. I realize that I know very little about Miriam Makeba, except that she was a hugely famous singer from South Africa who was once married to jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela. I buy it and later that evening play it for the first time. Once I hear the opening “Pata Pata,” I recognize it from somewhere, and a little Googling tells me it was a hit stateside, reaching #12 in ’67. I flip the record sleeve over and read the liner notes and they are strange, describing Makeba’s music thusly: “Splashy as Victoria Falls. Deep as the Indian Ocean. Hot as a Pretoria cat house. Bright as a diamond mine.” I ponder the living conditions in a South African brothel in the 1960s, and then think—Hey, aren’t diamond mines actually really dark?
The next song comes on and it’s called “Ha Po Zamani.” It’s so beautiful I can’t stop playing it. I’m having trouble making it track three. Her voice is just towering, some hairline cracks on the highest notes only reinforcing its overall power. She sings, a chorus answers, she moves to wordless “ee-ee-ee” refrains, all over a simple backing of guitar, bass, percussion. I add it to a Spotify playlist so I can hear it away from my living room. I think about sharing it on Twitter, but the only recording of this version on YouTube is, bizarrely, accompanied stock photos of white people smiling and blowing kisses to the camera and making peace signs. I do some Googling to see what the lyrics are about, and I see athat they are in the South African language Xhosa. And I see that this impossible beautiful song is about a person who has been utterly broken by apartheid, someone who is homeless and a physical wreck because the political system in place says it must be so. I play it again and think some more.
Philip Sherburne: “I Had a Rooster” — Pete Seeger
One of the things I hadn't foreseen about being a new parent is how tricky it can be to find music the whole family can enjoy together. In some sense, there's no trick to it at all. When the baby's young enough, she's not even going to notice what you've put on—provided it's not, say, Slayer's Reign in Blood with the volume all the way up. Still, you feel like the occasion calls for something special. Overnight, your whole life has changed, and your listening habits ought somehow to reflect that. For the first six months, my wife and I listened to a lot of King Sunny Ade's Juju Music and convinced ourselves that our daughter was grinning and gurgling in response to the record's bright colors and euphoric moods, but I'm pretty sure that was just confirmation bias. Likewise, we logged a lot of hours with Bill Wells and Friends’ wonderfulNursery Rhymes, a collection of standards ("Three Blind Mice,” “Hickory Dickory Dock") given a knotty, abstracted spin by players like Yo La Tengo, Annette Peacock, and Karen Mantler. We love it, but if I'm honest with myself, I'm pretty sure my daughter has yet to pick up on the finer points of their oddly voiced chords and supple jazz arrangements.
Things got really tough when we decided we needed proper kids’ music—stuff we could sing along to, and learn to sing ourselves. On a hunch, I searched for “Smithsonian Folkways children,” having a vague recollection that Moses Asch and Marian Distler's iconic folk label had an extensive collection of children's records. My hunch paid off, leading us to Pete Seeger's 1955 albumBirds, Beasts, Bugs and Fishes (Little and Big), featuring children's songs that Seeger's stepmother, Ruth Crawford, transcribed from Library of Congress field recordings and published in her books American Folk Songs for Children and American Animal Songs for Children. “I Had a Rooster” is the one we keep coming back to. It's a simple song, just a roll-call of animals—cat, cow, pig, duck—followed by an imitation of their meow, moo, oink, and so on. But Seeger's voice is reassuring and playful, and his banjo is rooted in an old, weird America of folk music that tickles me to think is being passed on to my daughter, 61 years after the song was recorded. She actually hasn't heard much of Seeger's version; mostly, we just sing it to her, every night at bath time, and she lights up every time we get to the “cock-a-doodle-doo” refrain. But then, that's how folk music is supposed to work: Seeger was just a conduit for a song that came long before him, and now so are we.
Ryan Dombal: “Memory Motel” — The Rolling Stones
Around the time of the Rolling Stones’ 1976 album Black and Blue, a promotional billboard featuring a bound and bruised model was placed above the Sunset Strip. The accompanying copy read: “I’m ‘Black and Blue’ from the Rolling Stones—and I love it!” Yikes. Beyond problematic, the stunt was ugly and dumb, eventually drawing protests from women’s groups and a removal. The episode backed up the general impression of the Stones in the ’70s as asshole bad boys, strung-out arena rock relics whose best times were gone. And there is certainly truth to that. But the billboard is also somewhat ironic, since Black and Blue’s centerpiece is all about the emptiness of being strung-out arena rock relics: “Memory Motel” is a downbeat ode to a one-night-stand and a life lived in passing that dials into the same sort of despondency Drake would take on with “Marvin’s Room” 35 years later.
I came across the song after recently reading Keith Richards’ autobiography Life and delving into the Stones’ less revered material. There are a few passages in the candid book where Richards discusses the women he’s slept with through the years. “I’ve had some lovely junkie babes on the road, ones that saved my life, got me off the hook here and there,” he writes. “And most of them not lowlife bitches.” (Obviously the book is not politically correct.) He goes onto describe an Australian who supplied him with pharmaceutical cocaine so frequently during a 1973 tour that he decided to move into her home for a week, even changing her baby son’s diapers while she went to work. “There’s somebody in a suburb in Melbourne who doesn’t even know I wiped his ass,” he concludes, wistfully. Asides like this help add nuance to the Stones’ storied debauchery. So does “Memory Motel.” After all, the song’s hook has Mick Jagger recalling lines that a lady friend sang to him: “You’re just a memory of a love that used to be.” Both parties are mere blips in the grand scheme and, for the Stones, transience was their only constant. Meanwhile, Richards starts singing midway through, his voice weathered and sad: “She got a mind of her own and she use it well.” Maybe a line like that wouldn’t play on a billboard in 1976 but it still holds up.
Matthew Schnipper: “Mayas Traum” — Peter Giger
There’s a seller on eBay named Nobbyknucks who happened into the record collection of a lifetime. Through this year, in batches of a few hundred LPs, he has been listing mythically rare records, mostly from the jazz and avant garde realm. In terms of purchasing, this has mostly been out of my depth (though the high price tags do have a way of making a $200 Milford Graves LP seem like a bargain). But scrolling through the listings is like checking out the collection of a new friend with very good taste. Anything with an interesting cover or a name I vaguely recognized, I’d open in a new tab then Google. Peter Giger, a potentially nutso German percussionist, has been my favorite discovery. Long story short, check out his killer outfit and extreme chill pose on this image that opens his website. You can print that out and pop it on your mood board and stop here if you’d like.
But if you continue digging, you’ll find a guy who performed with Duke Ellington, made fuzzed-out psych, some not so great electronic music, and a wealth of gorgeous percussion-only albums. Though I missed Illegitimate Music, the Giger record Nobbyknucks had for sale, I picked up Family of Percussionfor cheap. The album does what it says on the tin: the dude plays a lot of drums. You can see all of them on the cover, laid out neat like an archaeologist puts together dinosaur bones just pulled from the ground. In vibe, it’s clear Giger is a hippie. The long hair, the psychedelic website, the genre jumping. But in sound, at least on this album, he’s a master. It’s difficult to identify any one player whose musical diversity is so deep. Yes, it’s narrow—he really loves the drums—but as wide as narrow can get.
Laura Snapes: “Launderette” — Vivien Goldman
I wish I had a romantic story about how I discovered Vivien Goldman's music. Truth is, I hadn't heard any of it before I was asked if I fancied interviewing her. I said yes on the basis that she did the liner notes for Light in the Attic’s reissue of Lizzy Mercier Descloux's albums (my all-time favorites) and wrote for all the British inkies in the 1970s and 80s. I sensed a kindred spirit. It turned out that “Launderette,” originally released in 1981, contained everything I want to hear: a sly dub bass line, scratchy percussion, and the languid jazz-influenced weirdness that runs through all the best punk and post-punk records, courtesy of the originators of those sounds.
Goldman snuck into the sessions for PiL's Flowers of Romance and recorded the track during their downtime, roping in Keith Levene, John Lydon, Robert Wyatt, Aswad's George Oban, and the Raincoats’ Vicky Aspinall. Fittingly, the single outlines the sometimes-uncomfortable closeness of community: a downhearted Goldman needs “10 pence for the dryer,” and finds an obliging boy lingering by the washing machine. “I felt I needed hugging / You needed board and lodging,” she sings wryly. Next thing she knows, he's moved in—his hairs around the bath, their socks tangled in the dryer, “your jeans running into my shirt”—and he won't leave. The leap from convenience to comfort to being trapped feels like a domestic drama in miniature, and vanquishes retrogressive expectations of women as homemakers: “I had to learn to say no,” Goldman says firmly. It's righteous and funny, but also nostalgic. There are just 3000 launderettes left in the UK (compared to 12,5000 in the late 1970s), thanks to home-owned washer-dryers and the collapse of local communities. Goldman's “Launderette” stands proudly among a small canon of early ‘80s art that recognized the importance of the laundromat, like Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette, and Levi's classic stonewash jeans commercial, soundtracked by Marvin Gaye's “Heard it Through the Grapevine.” (My kingdom for a Slits re-edit for a post-punk full circle.) Still, as distant as its setting is, there’s something sweaty and exasperated about it; a latent summer jam if I ever heard one.
Jeremy Gordon: “Return to Pooh Corner” — Kenny Loggins
It’s said that actors don’t truly understand the role of King Lear until they themselves have become old, wizened men, watching powerlessly as their children attempt to forget them. Similarly, I don’t think Kenny Loggins fully understood “House at Pooh Corner” until he himself became a father. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who originally recorded the song in 1970, heard “Pooh Corner” as country funk; the duo of Loggins and Jim Messina, who recorded it in 1971, sang it as gentle folk rock. But the song didn’t uncurl into its idyllic ideal until more than twenty years later, when Loggins re-recorded it for an album of children’s music. By the ’90s, he’d shorn off the beard and foregone all macho “Danger Zone” masculinity for a more genteel, paternal personality. When he sang “Return to Pooh Corner,” a retitled version of the original song with a new verse written for his third son, he removed the drums, brought in Christian singer Amy Grant to duet, and found an even most earnest way to deliver the storybook lyrics. In an introduction to a 1996 televised special aimed at combating childhood hunger, he explained his change in perspective. “When I wrote those lyrics 28 years ago, I was reflecting on my own special childhood memories of happy times and Winnie the Pooh,” he said. “Nowadays, I have four children of my own, and of all the things my kids and I have done together, I think the quiet times of night songs will endure as my most precious memories.”
I don’t have children, but I did watch “Winnie the Pooh” as a kid. And while I believe in adulthood, the song transports me. Loggins sings like he’s sprawled out on a picnic blanket under a clear, blue sky, as he and his children count the bees and chase the clouds—an afternoon without the responsibilities of advanced age. It goes past Hundred Acre Wood—which, yes, does sound like a lovely place—to a purer, innocent space, far removed from the considerations of the adult world. My friends and I joke about it, because it’s easy—like, hell yes, we’d like to hang a left at Pooh Corner and spend a day frolicking with a puppet bear and his friends, rather than literally anything else we have going on in our lives. On one hand is paying taxes; on the other is palling with a mopey, talking donkey. The choice is yours. Aside from the palatable, pastoral folk sound, which is so relaxing as to resemble aural Vicodin, “Return to Pooh Corner” works as a nice reminder of life’s longevity: You think you’ve got something figured out, and as the years go on, you figure it out even more.
Matthew Strauss: “The Fez” — Steely Dan
When I moved into my new apartment, I took with me my dad’s record collection. Along with the requisite Beatles and Dead LPs, he had the entire Steely Dan discography (sans Two Against Nature, of course). I grew up hearing bits, but found their music boring and even nauseating as a kid. This year was the first time I really listened to the classic rock of Can’t Buy a Thrill, the lyricism of Katy Lied, or the overall brilliance of Aja. But what stood out most was 1976's The Royal Scam, no doubt influenced by my Kanye West-aided familiarity with the record. It’s the Dan’s most insular record, and “The Fez” is its most perplexing track. Like much of the album, “The Fez” is lyrically impenetrable but it’s also considerably more compact, with Donald Fagen repeating the same phrase about wanting “to be your holy man,” conjuring images of a naked man in just a hat. There’s no narrative progression, only musical. It’s the Dan at their Steeliest: funky, unsettling, enticing, and virtuosic. “The Fez” plays the line between sycophantic and messianic as well as any Steely Dan song. Is Donald Fagen really worth a dime for those lyrics? Probably not. But it’s hard not to croon along with him and the swanky Walter Becker-led backing band.
It’s fun to think of Steely Dan as my dad’s favorite band. It’s not really heartwarming music, but makes me feel closer with him, like I’m trying to make sense of it all, as he did when he was younger. He told me “The Fez” is not his most favorite Steely Dan song, and admitted he still has no idea what the song means. He decided to revisit the scant lyrics to get a better idea and came back with some suggestions that the titular fez is a condom and Donald Fagen is a sex god. As discomfiting as it was to hear from him, he’s probably right. We will never know what Fagen meant and we don’t want to know, either. I'm comforted by the idea that we’re both enchanted by the same disturbing metaphors.
Marc Hogan: “Way Out There” — Sons of the Pioneers
One of my music-business sources has been telling me that the industry should be doing more to promote older songs on streaming services. Considering how much Netflix viewing must be binge-watching old episodes of “Buffy” or “The Wonder Years,” the record labels would probably be smart to push their classics a bit harder, too. “Discovery” is industry jargon now, but it seems like more old songs I’ve spent time with heavily this year have been re-discoveries, like David Bowie’s 1960s nugget “In the Heat of the Morning,” which I originally heard when Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner covered it with his Last Shadow Puppets side project almost a decade ago. But maybe that’s because in the streaming era I’m mainly hearing old music a song at a time, and then moving onto the next one too quickly to process it. In that spirit, then maybe the most important old song I’ve discovered would always be the most recent one.
This week, I was checking out Seattle public radio station KEXP’s overnight show, as I often do when I’m starting my day. After the Stanley Brothers’ “I’m a Man of Constant Sorrow,” played in tribute to the recently passed bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley, I heard a yodeled tune that reminded me so much of the country-and-western standard “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” I suspected the DJ had planned a Coen Brothers twofer. Instead it was another song by the same songwriter and group, Bob Nolan’s Sons of the Pioneers: 1937’s “Way Out There.” My encounter with it might have been as ephemeral as so many others if my 4-year-old hadn’t asked me about a lyric he misheard as “cacket green.” Instead it was a “cactus tree,” but looking up the words had me captivated by the song’s tale of a lonesome soul kicked off a train car—for humming!—and thrown into the desert, where he spends a little time with the moon until he can hop onto a later locomotive. Or does he die out there, and it’s all a metaphor somehow? Beats me—but a discovery has been made nonetheless. Better yet, it's a far older one than the labels will probably remember to market to us again.
Kevin Lozano: “Sandstorm” — Darude
I was in a coffee shop last week attempting to fit a lid onto a slippery plastic cup that was handed to me, and then out of nowhere blaring like a goddamn rocketship from the shop’s speakers was Darude’s “Sandstorm.” I was utterly flabbergasted and elated, so much so that the cup fell to my feet. I stood there for half a moment too long, letting the liquid slowly spread like tendrils across the wood floor. I couldn’t do anything besides let the beatific coincidence sink in. I was thinking about an ur-moment for my music taste in weeks before, and with my feet soggy, I knew that I could trace my love of electronic music to “Sandstorm's” opening chords. Even after the song became an ironic party favorite during my time in college, I can’t shake my very unironic origin story. Though it's been a few years since I've thought about “Sandstorm,” I realized that what I look for in some electronic music is the feeling of victory this song generates. So I'm sort of cheating on this prompt, because “Sandstorm” isn't an old track I've just discovered this year—but my relationship to it feels new, in light of this experience.
“Sandstorm” was released in 1999 and uploaded onto MP3.com, a prehistoric file sharing service from the halcyon days before the dot-com bubble burst, becoming a meme before memes were even a thing. I first encountered the song playing World of Warcraft as an adolescent, listening to it during my countless hours of play. I was equally obsessed with the video—which, if you haven't seen it, please do. It features a briefcase heist, a parkour-stylized chase sequence, and more action than any movie that’s come out this year. Darude released a sequel to “Sandstorm” called “Feel the Beat,” which is not nearly as good but still very chill. It also continues the story of the music video, featuring a very fun-looking island rave. If you were wondering what was in the mysterious suitcase from the “Sandstorm” video, it’s a resplendent gold vinyl record containing all the hopes and dreams of partiers across the world.
Sam Sodomsky: “Yvette in English” — Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell’s 1994 album Turbulent Indigo is often cited as the return-to-form, comeback moment in her career, but “Yvette in English” doesn’t really sound like anything she’s ever done. Its ancestors are the road-weary character studies on 1976’s Hejira, but “Yvette” is something stranger. By the ‘90s, Mitchell’s voice had grown softer and deeper, like an alto sax, weaving throughout the noir-ish orchestration, introducing characters, dialogue, and setting, without tying them into a narrative. This song, as well as a smoother bossa nova rendition by David Crosby, who shares a co-writing credit on it, has served as a constant companion for me this year. Like any of Mitchell’s great songs, it comes to you when you need it most: a quiet mystery, an unraveling travelogue, a little bit of instant bliss.
Corey Smith-West: “On the Island” — Leon Ware
I learned to love music enough write to about it for a living from my mother. Much of my childhood was spent watching her sing along to Teddy Pendergrass, Marvin Gaye, and Minnie Riperton from the passenger seat of our Toyota Sienna. Over the years, I’ve kept a mental archive of her coming-of-age stories during the late days of Motown. They remain somewhat mythical to me. I can still hear her voice crescendo recalling evenings spent by radios with her college friends waiting for new Stevie Wonder singles. And, in time I’ve realized the way her eyes water during “One in a Million You” is less about Larry Graham than it is about the places and people she remembers, back from when she first heard it. Today I constantly encounter records I suspect will define my early twenties, yet I often return to her favorite soul hits. Sometimes as I ride the J train, sit at my desk, or lay on my fire escape with friends I close my eyes and try dig past the familiarity of these songs in order to hear them like she might have back then.
Listening to “On the Island” for the first time is perhaps the nearest I’ve gotten to this. I hadn’t known about Ware before Pitchfork’s recent exploration of Marvin’s I Want You. After reading Ware's interview with Jason King, I bought his Inside Is LoveandMusical MassageLPs. Among the many great tracks I heard, “On the Island” stuck out to me instantly—it’s the #1 single that Ware was always meant to have. In an alternate world, it’d be among my mom’s collection of homemade greatest hits compilations. She’d have a story for the first time she "Soul Train’ed" the night away to Ware’s smooth baritone. For now though, the song remains my discovery, and I plan, the next time I’m home, to be the one to share it with her. I'm glad that, as the flurries of animal noises break and Ware emerges hands outstretched, beckoning for her to follow him to the tropics, I’ll be there firsthand.