From Critics at Large: An American Playlist

18:43Alexandra Schwartz:He's the coolest. I mean, what a mustache. Great lyricist.

18:48Vinson Cunningham:All we need to say is, if you don't know what David Crosby looks like, Google him and then listen to Almost Cut My Hair and try to imagine an alternate reality where David Crosby had cut his hair. That's not a world we want to live in, okay? It was never going to happen.

19:03Alexandra Schwartz:Absolutely not. Shout out to the cross, yeah.

19:05Vinson Cunningham:Okay. We've arrived at a rather exciting moment. It's time for you know me to share your pick. Well, you know, I could have picked many a song, obviously. You know, we were texting about this. You were like, who's going to do like Miley Cyrus's Party in the USA, which is a song I really like. I was like, should I like pick up the gauntlet? I don't know. In the end, I went with a song that is near and dear to my heart. I picked Tom Petty's Free Falling. Ooh, Petty's on the list. She's a good girl. Loves her mama. Loves Jesus. In America, too. She's a good girl. It's about a girl who is this kind of all-American sweetheart, perhaps the kind of all-American sweetheart that Olivia Rodrigo is kind of like focalizing through in the song that we just heard.

20:09The song is sung from the perspective of a boy who has perhaps broken this girl's heart. But there's a wrinkle in this, right? There's a wrinkle in this. Not all is well. And there's that refrain.

20:34And I was thinking about the free, free falling. I'm free. Like, what is more American? And yet, I'm free. Pause. Free falling. You know? Like, what comes after that freedom? Can that freedom allow us to ascend? Or will it end up just kind of like, you know, letting us kind of go downhill maybe? Fall. It's like, is there kind of like a prelapsarian thing happening here? The song came out in late 1989. And in 1990, I came to America for a year. I was in ninth grade. I was very enchanted with it. I think it gave me a very specific feeling about the promise of America and perhaps that dashed promise.

21:28Vinson Cunningham:And also, it's exciting to sing the song always, whenever it comes on. The best song. Also, melodically, it's just the best. Yeah, it's a great song. Tom Petty also never cut his hair, both in the literal sense and in the spiritual sense. Another freak letting his flag fly.

21:41Alexandra Schwartz:A freak who nonetheless succumbed to like the most American thing, which is like. The super group? The super group. That, yes. But also never, ever really getting over high school.

21:53Vinson Cunningham:Oh, yeah. The imagery, like the bad boy, the good boy.

21:56Alexandra Schwartz:So much of our tropes that we employ, especially in pop music, but all over the place, John Hughes movies, et cetera, et cetera, has to do with the situation of high school and how it describes the kind of social hierarchy of the nation. Yes. We never let it go, and Petty uses it to all these different ends.

22:15Vinson Cunningham:So true. Okay. I have Andrea, and I think Andrea's song is going to strike a chord of nostalgia with many people. Uh-oh. I mean, or, oh, yeah. Hi, critics. This is Andrea. I would like to suggest the song America by Simon and Garfunkel, which I realize is a very literal answer to your songs about America. But I also think it's just a really, really great song. It has this beautiful imagery of a couple on a road trip.

22:57Michigan seems like a dream to me now It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw I've come to look for America There's a whole bunch of different American towns that are kind of name-checked in states that are discussed where this couple is on a bus and they're people watching and they're making fun of people behind their backs and they're smoking cigarettes and they're eating something called a Mrs. Wagner's pie. And it's such a beautiful and tender song. And then, of course, it like billows out to the line, they've all come to look for America. Counting the cars on the new jersey turn back, they've all come to look for America.

23:50Oh, God.

24:19Vinson Cunningham:I was in Katie Levy's apartment. We were probably 13. And her mom said, can you believe I had my first kiss to this song? Like, girls, you can't do better than that in life. And so that is— You're like, Mrs. Levy. That gave me a sense, which I think is something I associate with this song, that very specific story that I associate with it. But this is a song that strikes a kind of young, yearning heart afresh in each generation. This is an enduring song for many reasons, but it captures that sense of nostalgic wandering and searching. It's like the same feeling to me that comes up in Fast Car, the Tracy Chapman song, which is another great song about a certain kind of American feeling of escape, wandering, getting free, and hoping that the highway will take you somewhere.

25:11And it's also the song came out in 68. And that is the year that canonically everything went wrong. I mean, it's one of the years. But but you know, it's like the transition from the summer of love into like the Chicago Democratic Convention, Bobby Kennedy. It's like, you know, the part where he sings, Kathy, I'm lost. I said, though, I knew she was sleeping. I'm empty and aching. And I don't know why. this kind of like searching, the searching generation. Totally. What are we going to find? Maybe we'll find something bad.

25:49Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, and then, I mean, in one of the great juxtapositions of all time, that very moving lyric then goes to counting the cars in the New Jersey turnpike. Like, oh, he's in hell. I get it.

26:01Alexandra Schwartz:It's funny. I got it. I came to Simon and Garfogle, it seems to me too late. I was already a teenager, but it was still too late. They're one of my favorite outfits. I used to, so in college, I always took the bus to school from New York. And on the bus, because I was just getting introduced to this, you know, when you think of what does America sound like, Simon and Garfunkel and the larger category of singer-songwriter, largely guitar-based, finger-picking and harmony singing is one of the, you know, and this was my introduction to that. And now it's so funny. I thought of bus travel then as an announcement of the fact that I didn't have any money, which I didn't.

26:44Alexandra Schwartz:But now I'm so nostalgic for bus travel. And just like how many different kinds of people. What Andrea said about like the billowing into all come, it's so true. And true to Paul Simon's genius, you know, the first time they all come, blah, blah, blah, it's they're singing in unison. And the second time, you know, Garfunkel just goes into that angelic high harmony, you know? And it's like even the harmony singing is about a kind of plural living.

27:21Vinson Cunningham:We'll be right back with more of the Critics at Large American playlist after the break.

27:37Hi, critics.

27:38Alexandra Schwartz:When I was thinking of American music, I thought of the folk movement of the mid-20th century. Woody Guthrie and his guitar, This Machine Kills Fascists, This Land Is Your Land, If I Had a Hammer. But the song that has always meant the most to me from that era is actually a cover. It's Joan Baez on an album. It's a live recording of her at a concert where she ends it by asking the crowd to sing along with her to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which I think is the great American song.

28:11Vinson Cunningham:There is one last thing I have to ask you to do. This is purely for my own enjoyment and I hope for yours. Would you sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic with me? Thank you.

28:30I've seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He is trampling out the vintage where the...

28:39Alexandra Schwartz:John Steinbeck took the title of what you could call the great American novel, The Grapes of Wrath, from The Battle Hymn of the Republic. It's a song that was written during the Civil War by abolitionists, explicitly as a pro-Union song. The lyric that has always meant the most to me is, As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.

29:04Vinson Cunningham:As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free. His truth is marching on.

29:16Alexandra Schwartz:It is a very righteous song. It is a very clear-eyed song about what it wants. and I think the lyrics and that lyric in particular have always just spoken to me as what I love about America and what I wish America could always be. First of all, Kevin, that was a great voicemail. There are many ways to think of, okay, what is a protest song and specifically what is this period that he talks about in the middle of last century. It's so interesting just with John Bias to talk about the figure of the folk singer because there's this interesting these dueling impulses seems to me and maybe what we might call american countercultural thinking which is there's a lot in this country that you cannot trust but at the same time we tend to invest a lot of energy and trust in this figure of the sort of authenticity, cool, integrity, the figure who sort of unadorned naked, but for their guitar.

30:28Alexandra Schwartz:And of course, as you hear in that recording, the community around the singer can start to, I don't know, it's this really naive and beautiful idea that, okay, if I I can present to you a figure of sufficient integrity, intention, that we can countervail all those big, unnamed, untrustable forces. It's also just worth saying how these lyrics, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, but also the tune, it comes first from the song John Brown's Body, another famous Civil War song. And it's just really interesting to think about how songs, almost act like pamphlets in early America. Yeah. It's not unlike something like the Federalist Papers or Common Sense.

31:20Alexandra Schwartz:These songs, both John Brown's body and the Battle Hymn of the Republic, get quoted in speeches and enlisted by various movements all down history. And then for somebody to sing it, not unlike the way that Lincoln re-inscribed the Declaration of Independence when he quotes it at Gettysburg, John Baez takes this thing, this artifact of the Civil War, the battle hymn of the Republic, and says, no, no, no, it still has everything to do with this. There's this like almost like sermonic impulse. So I think protest music is about that too. Not just a moment, but it gives form to a set of situations that might also reoccur.

32:03Alexandra Schwartz:It's like this totem in the present, but also a lasso out to the future.

32:07Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I love the way some of these submissions expand the idea of what a protest song can be. Let's just play a few in a row. Hi, critics. My name is Brandi from San Jose, California. You guys asked for songs for the 250th playlist of the United States, and I've been sitting on this one for a minute because every time I think about what I want to add to this, I land in the same place, and that is protest songs. You know, what is the United States without our incredible legacy of protest? So I grew up on protest songs. You know, we had the whole canon playing in the house. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Marvin Gaye.

32:47That was the soundtrack of my childhood. And I've been thinking about how that thread carried down to my siblings and me. And I laughed because a couple months ago, my brother had a box from our parents' house and it had all these old T-shirts. and we were joking about selling them on eBay. But when he pulled out the Rage Against the Machine shirt, he was like, absolutely not. I'm keeping this one. Because obviously the themes of Rage Against the Machine are completely relevant today. So here's my pick for your mix. Sleep Now in the Fire by Rage Against the Machine.

33:31Me and you tomorrow, I'll drag you to the grave. I'm deep inside your children. I'm going to swear you in my name. It's what keeps me proud to protest even now and what keeps me proud to be an American. So play some rage. Hey, critics. This is Greg from Southern California. My pick is John Prine's Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore from 1971. It's a great anti-war protest song. It makes me laugh. It feels like he could have written it today. And that gives me hope, you know, because we've obviously been through stuff like this before and gotten through it.

34:28matter what the reason is for and you feel like a gal won't get you into heaven anymore

34:39my name is quinn and i'm from fayetteville north carolina the most american song i can think of is the 1969 recording of compared to what uh for bertafak's album first take the song covers religion and greed and it also directly mentions abortion and war in ways that just seem as relevant in 2026 as they did in 1969. I said I love the lie, lie the love, hanging on with push and shove. Possession is the motivation, hanging up the whole damn nation. Honestly, in the thousand years, if there's one thing I think or hope America will be known for, It's the music that came from artists like Roberta Flack, Nina Simone, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, or Stevie Wonder.

35:33It's music that just pushes us towards better pastures, and I'm just really grateful it exists.

35:49Vinson Cunningham:Vincent, you're up. What's your pick for the playlist?

35:53Alexandra Schwartz:My pick is really an artifact of me trying to fit in as much as I could. I, too, for the listener who, you know, you're kind of doing this self-deprecating thing about choosing America by Simon and Garfunkel, I almost went in that direction, too. There's lots of ways I wanted to go. But the song that I'd like to talk about is called Ohio slash Machine Gun. And it is a double cover, a kind of medley of two songs being reinterpreted by the Isley Brothers. By my lights, if you talk about great American bands, you cannot enter a room where the Isley Brothers are not present. The Isley Brothers cover this song in the context of one of my favorite albums ever.

36:51Alexandra Schwartz:The album's called Given It Back. And the Isleys, who famously wrote Shout, all these great songs, they were always covered by white bands, which was a big feature of musical production in the middle of last century. white bands taking black songs covering them because perhaps with the idea that perhaps their audiences wouldn't want to hear it from someone like the Isley Brothers they would want to hear it from someone else and the Isley Brothers it kind of shows in the title of the album giving it back, you know we're going to take a bunch of songs we like from white guys so they cover like Stephen Stills they cover Neil Young, they take all these wonderful songs so that's one of the things i wanted to talk about with like what's the most american song to me the most american song is is like a property that is taken and deployed in another way uh the isley brothers initially from cincinnati ohio which i think has a lot to do with their choice to cover the song ohio which was initially sung by crosby stills nash and young written by neil young in the wake of the Kent State Massacre of 1970.

38:11Alexandra Schwartz:Famously, Ohio State troopers descended upon the campus of Ohio State to break up a Vietnam War protest. The troopers fired into the crowd, and this resulted in the deaths of several students. This is not so much a protest song as a song depicting protests. It, to me, seems almost novelistic in this. It just wants to widen the aperture of your vision and say, here's what a protest is. And here's what the man is like. And here's what happens when they come together. Another thing, what does America sound like? I think this is so beautiful. It happens a little bit in the Neil Young version, but so much more here.

39:00Alexandra Schwartz:What does America sound like? If you listen to anything about the American Revolution, it's going to be scored with this fife and drum thing, which to me, I love. You're a fife and drum man. I love fife and drum. He's a bit of a fife and drum man. He's a bit of a fife and drum man. Just that weird military snare.

39:16Alexandra Schwartz:This is part of the American sound.

39:27We're finally on our own This summer I hear the drumming Poor dead in Ohio Poor dead in Ohio Poor dead in Ohio Poor dead in Ohio

39:49Alexandra Schwartz:The latter half of the song, under the Crosby, Stills, and Nash and Young lyrics, they start to play the chord changes from Jimi Hendrix's song Machine Gun. And again, what does America sound like? The electric guitar is invented in America in 1932. And Jimi Hendrix, at least to the time, certainly of the making of the song, is its sort of popular genius. And he's making it sound like guns and bombs and everything. There's a point where Ron Isley in this reinterpretation starts to sing like Jimi Hendrix's guitar, this whale. He's like, you know, Hendrix would say, and he's like, he just starts doing this like vocal interpretation of the electric guitar.

40:47Alexandra Schwartz:And these musicians from Ohio singing this song, talking about violence, talking about sorrow, not only sort of re-describe the protest situation, but also I think implicitly talk about this is kind of what it was like for us black boys to grow up in this situation as artists just the place just us trying to make it out of the midwest um again about the clash between sort of classes and kinds and um i don't know american figures but doing it through this again very american sound so just like taking the military drum and putting it on one end of a pole with by the end of the song, The Electric Guitar.

41:33Alexandra Schwartz:The Isley Brothers are great American geniuses. And so you can't do this without them.

41:40Vinson Cunningham:Absolutely. Love it. You know, Vincent, I thought a lot about the song, Ohio, not the Isley Brothers version, which I'm so happy to be introduced to now, but the CSNY version. I thought about it when Renee Good and Alex Freddie were killed in Minnesota. And this deployment of troops against American citizens protesting when, you know, you feel like you're going back in the past to a moment that this song describes. So this kind of repetitive nature brings this music back to us and it brings its power back to us also.

42:14Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah.

42:25Vinson Cunningham:E Pluribus Unum, playlist. Critics at Large, an American playlist. We'll be right back.

42:45Vinson Cunningham:You ready for my pick? Oh, yeah. Everybody? Yes. I can't wait. It's my turn to share with the class. Okay, so Bob Dylan's 115th Dream. I don't know if you guys, if that immediately rings a bell. It may very well not. I'm not, unfortunately. It doesn't for me. Don't be sorry, because it's coming to us now. So this song, Bob Dylan's 115th Dream by Bob Dylan, is from the album Bringing It All Back Home from 1965. Bob Dylan is important to me deeply. He's just woven throughout my own personal history. He is at the heart of American music for me. So when I think of what I love about Bob Dylan and what makes his voice so quintessentially American to me, it's Dylan going electric and saying, actually, I was about all that, and I was part of the collective, and I still am part of the collective, but I'm also really me.

43:43Vinson Cunningham:It's about individualism, which is also a very American quality. This is the album where Dylan goes electric. It has subterranean homesick blues. It has Maggie's Farm. It has Mr. Tambourine Man. He's kind of like flirting with it and not. But what I love about Bob Dylan's 115th Dream is it's like a comic novel of a song. It's very lyrically dense, and its protagonist, a trickster figure, arrives on the Mayflower, in America with someone called Captain A-Rab. They've been looking for Moby Dick. They find America instead.

44:18Alexandra Schwartz:I was riding on the Mayflower and I thought I'd spot some land. I yelled for Captain A-Rab. I have you understand. Who came running to the deck? Said, boys, forget the will. We're going over yonder. Cut the engines, change the sails. Haul on the ball.

44:39Vinson Cunningham:The narrator of the song arrives in this place. He says, I think I'll call it America. Casual little bit of naming. I wonder what that reminds us of, perhaps the real thing. I think I'll call it America.

44:50Alexandra Schwartz:I said it's we hit land. I took a deep breath. I fell down, I could not stand. Captain A-Rab, he started.

44:58Vinson Cunningham:So Captain A-Rab is there, and he started writing up some deeds. He said, let's set up a fort and start buying the place with beads.

45:06Alexandra Schwartz:Yes, then this cop comes down the street crazy as a loon. He throws us all in jail for carrying our clothes.

45:14Vinson Cunningham:What I love is that Dylan is taking real things that happened or myths about real things that happened, like the buying of land in America for wampum, for instance. And he's making it this kind of joke, this crazy surrealist thing, because that's what American history is. It's totally mad. It's a mishmash. It's blood. It's guns. But it's also just wild ambition, crazy ego, big, weird dreams, God talking directly to you. So all of that is in the song, this sense of a visionary coming, but also a bum. The song is about it's not about rugged individualism. It's about ragged individualism. It's about a bum just rambling around and looking at stuff.

45:55Vinson Cunningham:It's just taking a comic novelist's mind and eye towards this whole thing and making it come alive so that you feel this wild texture of the country. The end of the song is such a great kicker. Is it possibly the greatest kicker ever? It might be when the singer is leaving. He sees three ships sailing in. I saw three ships sailing. They were all heading my way. I asked the captain what his name was and how come he didn't drive a truck. He said his name was Columbus. I just said good luck. And that's it. His name was Columbus. I just said good luck. I hear you. I hear you, Bob.

46:41Alexandra Schwartz:Amazing. Okay, here is an ode to another great American sound through a song that I did not know before, so I'm really appreciative. Here's Zach. Hey, critics. for me the most American instrument of all time has got to be the banjo and if you love the banjo you've heard the name Nora Brown in the last few years I first learned about Nora Brown when I was searching YouTube for another great banjo player's recording of Wild Goose Chase from his album on the Tennessee line Virgil Anderson but instead I found Nora playing the same song

47:20she's not an old guy sitting on her front porch she's a 16 year old girl and instead of being down on the Tennessee line she's sitting in what is very obviously a concrete heavy Brooklyn backyard and I was so chilled with amazement that she could channel all the very powerful feelings that that this music manages to convey feelings that to me are deeply connected with the love that I have for our country.

48:04Hi critics, this is Jessica calling from Brooklyn with a song that gives me an American feeling. My choice is That's Life, but not the Frank Sinatra version. The James Brown and the Famous Flames version from his Live at the Apollo album recorded in 1967. Maybe it's because I work for an environmental nonprofit and I feel pretty beat down right now, but this song feels very American to me. That's life

48:36Alexandra Schwartz:As funny as it may seem Some people get their kicks Stomping on a dream But I never, I never let it get me down As sure as this big old world keeps spinning around You know, America can stomp on your dreams, it can make you want to give up. But as sure as this big old world keeps spinning around, I know there's something in us that just won't let us quit. Hello, dear critics. I wanted to submit a piece called the Billy the Kid Suite, which is a ballet by the composer Aaron Copland, who you may know. And I think it's a very beautiful piece or collection of pieces. But I also think that the story of Aaron Copland is so interesting because in kind of the mid 20th century, all these European countries seem to have their national composer.

49:39And in the U.S. there were sort of two competing philosophies of what American concert music might be. there was this composer Charles Ives who wrote very complex, basically 12-tone band music. Charles Ives was this sort of hyper-masculine New England quintessential wasp. He wrote about how America needed to adopt 12-tone music because that was masculine music. And he had this famous saying, take dissonance like a man. And then on the other side, we have Aaron Copeland, this younger gay Jewish guy. And he wrote these beautifully consonant pieces like Fanfare for the Common Man and Appalachian Spring and Be Like the Kid, very visual pieces in a much more accessible harmonic language.

50:44And these really became the American canon of classical music, far more than anything that Ives wrote.

50:51Vinson Cunningham:Take that, bully. Yeah, we're dunking on you, Charles Ives. And I think this song and the story of this composer says something rather beautiful about America, which is maybe that what it means to be American going forward does not have to come from what America has been. I knew Vincent was going to be so psyched.

51:17Alexandra Schwartz:Yes, Copland is one of my favorite artists. I love Copland. Nathan, this is a genius pick, partially because it so well describes what we're trying to do in this episode. Just that journey of trying to articulate what does America sound like in the concert tradition is like a centuries-long thing. And Copland, I think, in so many different ways, you know, gets the closest.

51:46Vinson Cunningham:Well, Vincent, why don't you close us out? We have one more voicemail we're going to listen to.

51:51Alexandra Schwartz:I'm bringing one of my favorite songs and one of the best songs in American popular music history, honestly. Here's Anna.

52:00Hi, critics. My name is Anna. The song that encapsulates how I feel about the U.S. right now is the 1964 song A Change is Gonna Come by Sam Cooke. I was born by the river In a little tent Oh, and just like the river I've been running Ever since It's been a long A long time coming But I know A change gonna come Oh, yes it will I still listen to this song from time to time to have a good cry and to turn not to despair, but to solidarity and resistance.

53:06Vinson Cunningham:What a great place for us to end. I mean, Sam Cooke, first of all, voice of an angel, one of the most beautiful, emotional, spiritual voices, I think. And then A Change Is Gonna Come encapsulates perfectly the era in which it was written. It was released in 1964 in the civil rights movement, and you can get into the specifics of what was inspiring Cook. But that really helped me out to hear this at this moment, because I've been very excited for this episode, for doing music, for choosing songs, hearing the listener songs. But it always embarrasses me to say things like, happy birthday, America.

53:43Vinson Cunningham:I mean, my God, what we've all been put through historically. It's a lot to go back to the origin point and wave a little flag and say, like, yippee. It's just it's hard to get down with that for me personally at times. So I really appreciate being reminded through a lot of this music and especially through A Change Is Gonna Come of the enormous meaning that there is in being an American and trying to create a more perfect union. And that's what that song is about. And one thing that's really standing out to me from what the listeners sent in and from our own choices is how much the 60s and that moment of turmoil and change and anger and hope is resonating.

54:29Vinson Cunningham:We could almost make this an episode just about music from the 60s, and I think that's because the themes of political struggle and communal struggle and finding one another in the midst of all of this really resonate. So that's what I'm getting from the broader playlist. Where are you guys on this? I'm just, yeah, I co-sign everything you just said. And, you know, a few days ago, I found myself in the position of watching the White House UFC fights because I was writing about it. And this was to celebrate both Trump's 80th birthday and to celebrate America's 250th birthday, just to see guys slug each other on the South Lawn and just to see that juxtaposition of our country's most hallowed, kind of like iconic institution be the stomping grounds, the slugging grounds.

55:31made me quite depressed. And I feel like the nuance and the sensitivity and the thought that our listeners put into selecting these songs and sharing them with us made me feel hopeful about the future. You know, this is also what America is.

55:54Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, that question of what, you know, not only America is, but what is a nation, what is a sort of national home, all these questions, paying attention to music, I think, is helpful. It reminds us that, you know, what we think of as nation building, war making, all the things that constitute a nation, that's not, at least if you care about art, that's not where the real action is. The action is in our creative response to the circumstances that we're given. And that's what music is all about. It's like, who can see best and articulate best what is happening and then point in a new direction. So to hear all these songs is like just another great moment of insight into what our listeners feel about living and how all of us imagine it could sort of go otherwise.

56:49Alexandra Schwartz:And listening to music presents this great counterfactual about what could life be. So it's just great to hear from you guys. Thank you again. That's the best.

56:58Vinson Cunningham:It's wonderful. And we got so, so many responses that we couldn't use. This makes me want to repeat this exercise again and again. Every 4th of July. A Critics' Tradition.

57:22Vinson Cunningham:This has been Critics at Large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our show is mixed by Mike Kutchman, and we had engineering help today from Pran Bandy with music by Alexis Quadrado. Critics at Large is off next week. In the meantime, you can find each and every one of our episodes in our archives at newyorker.com slash critics.