Sunday jazz. This melody stays stuck in my head. Welcome to the club.

The kid was enjoying this one on the way home from daycare. All time bop.

Prompt: What’s a hidden gem or underrated song you love?

This is a hymn, slam poem, hue and cry, call to arms for our present moment. In a just world, people would scream-sing this song on street corners. But there it sits with 5,500 plays on Spotify. He's writing about his specific grad school experiences, but the theme is universal for anyone toiling in an unjust system. "I'm still sublimating my lust for life, unjustly!"

Prompt: What’s a guilty pleasure song?

Guilty pleasure is just a song that makes you happy, right? Regardless of genre or expected taste. Well, I get quite a bit of enjoyment from old timey songs about food. There are so many jazz, blues, early rock and rockabilly, and doo wop songs about food, and they are so much fun. A lot (most?) of them contain some kind of sexual innuendo, and most of them are up-tempo danceable tunes. And the titles... "Gimme a Pigfoot," "Save the Bones for Henry Jones," "Coffee and Reefer," "It Ain't the Meat, It's the Motion," "Get 'Em from the Peanut Man (Hot Nuts)," and so on. I have a whole playlist of them. I'm not really guilty about it, though. Maybe I should be?

Prompt: What’s a song you’ve had on repeat recently?

Dunno if this counts cause I haven't actually been listening to the song, but this one has been rattling around in my head for the past few days. Evan Dando singing a Florida Georgia Line song. Catchy as hell chorus.

I’ve been watching season 1 of Silo, which features Common in a starring role. It’s had me remembering some of his music I love. Here’s one featuring the one and only Jill Scott.

Prompt: What’s your favorite collaboration between artists?

Just getting to my Crucial Track after family time all day. I woke up to YouTube showing me Rufus Wainwright and Sara Bareilles singing She Used to Be Mine on PBS, which is a transcendent performance of that song. So I thought awesome, there’s my collab pick.

Turns out it’s not on any other streaming services. Bummer.

I thought about boygenius, Tom Petty/Stevie Nicks, Middle Brother, Joy Oladokun and a couple of different collaborators. But I settled on Dungeonesse.

Jenn Wasner is in most bands, I think. Wye Oak, Flock of Dimes, even Bon freakin’ Iver. But she also had this fabulous little collab with Jon Ehrens back in 2012/13.

It’s a no skips album for me. I just love it. Hope you enjoy the throwback synth pop/r&b vibes.

Which song would you use to introduce yourself to someone new?

I had a hard time thinking of a track to encompass all the kinds of music I like that I could give to a new person as a good representation of me. So I decided to flip it a bit.

I started thinking about how I value people who are interesting, intelligent, clever, not afraid to be edgy or emotionally raw, tasteful, witty, and well-spoken. So here's a song that kinda checks all those boxes. Hopefully I check those boxes, too.

Nice to meet you.

Powerful hope. Just one of a gang of Australian songwriters who have been killing me for years. The lyric, the delivery, the message... a song about living in/with/through messy, beautiful imperfection. "If you get everything right, then there's nothing else left."

Lots of people look down on Dylan's Christian trilogy, but there are some great tracks on those albums. And this one can fully be about a romantic relationship as much as about a relationship with god. I just love the laconic harmonica and the drums that somehow sound both lazy and in the pocket. The cadence of the lyrics gives forward movement to the song, as the drums are a little behind the beat.

This song makes me think of road trips and being comfortable in love. Summer's coming, y'all.