The Great Year-End Songs Debate

The Pitchfork Review

Pitchfork

Music, Music Commentary, Music Interviews, Music History

3.3 • 844 Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2020

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Building Pitchfork’s year-end lists of the best albums and songs is a lengthy and painstaking process, involving careful consideration of the 1,000-plus releases we review each year, and others we may have missed. We include innumerable factors in our decision-making, but sometimes it’s a matter of following instincts: with a gun to your head, which would you choose? On this episode, Pitchfork Editor Puja Patel is joined by Reviews Editor Jeremy Larson and Contributing Editor Andy Cush for some good-natured arguments about which songs by some of our favorite artists—like Waxahatchee, Phoebe Bridgers, Destroyer, and Moses Sumney—should make the cut this year.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Pitchfork Review.
0:08.3	I'm Puget Patel, the editor of Pitchfork.
0:10.7	So every year, Pitchfork's year-end list are this totally massive undertaking where we try to nail down the best music of the year.
0:19.3	It's a dizzying process that involves the entire
0:22.6	staff, input from critics who write for the site, hours and hours and hours of revisiting music,
0:29.1	and many debates and discussions between our editors and writers. To give you a little bit of context here,
0:35.2	pitchfork reviews over a thousand new albums on the site each year,
0:39.3	which feels completely mind-boggling.
0:43.5	And a lot of those albums have even more songs that we really love.
0:48.4	On top of that, there's all of the stuff that we might have missed
0:52.7	or covered in a different way on the site.
0:54.9	So it's a ton of music to consider overall.
0:57.8	Today, we thought it would be fun to bring some of the debates that we're having behind the scenes and on Slack here to the podcast.
1:04.6	Here with me is our reviews editor, Jeremy Larson, and our contributing editor, Andy Cush.
1:09.8	Hey, Pujia.
1:10.6	Hey, how's it going?
1:11.5	Hey, um, you know, it's going okay.
1:15.0	Not great.
1:16.3	Feeling the high of the election results and now the new low of the insanity that has followed it.
1:23.5	We thought we were okay for a couple days and now it's straight back to the weirdness.
1:28.3	I'm riding a dopamine roller coaster, just hanging on for dear life, just seeing what kind of
1:33.3	chemicals my brain is sending out and just kind of going with it, really.
	...

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