“If you had to choose one song to send to aliens in space who were going to destroy the earth — so it has to be something that proves the inherent good of humanity — which song would you pick?”
This question was posed last week by Karen Pittelman, singer/songwriter and leader of Karen & the Sorrows, who are preparing to release their second album, The Narrow Place, on Aug. 25. “Lately I’m thinking ‘As’ by Stevie Wonder,” she muses. “It shows a possibility for the redemption of human beings.”
Pittelman is a walking genre-agnostic musical encyclopedia, and she enjoys these sort of deep dives into pop, exacting about small details and sweeping in scope. During the course of a two-hour conversation — that grows to encompass the racist underpinnings of genre boundaries along with the greatness of, to name a few, Stevie Nicks, Waylon Jennings‘ drummer, songwriter Rod Temperton, guitarist George Benson and producer Quincy Jones — while fighting the din of clattering plates at Four & Twenty Blackbirds, a pie place in Gowanus, Brooklyn, she throws out heaps of these juicy pronouncements:
“I feel like Huey Lewis is under-appreciated. Everyone’s like, ‘he’s so hokey’ — he’s fucking solid.”
Or, “If you can’t fucking choose Nile Rodgers always, then your way of life is no good.”
Or, “The way people freaked out over [Beyoncé’s] ‘Daddy Lessons’ was fascinating — there’s no argument that anybody can make with any credibility to say that’s not a country song. Whatever definition of country you want to use, that fits. Oh, so it has horns? Is ‘Ring of Fire’ not a country song? That’s a bananas argument. Why is there this investment in saying that country music is a white genre?”
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