The New Yorker’s pop critic takes Laura David through a deep dive of the songs that have defined her love of music.
For lovers of the craft, it’s easy – maybe even rational – to feel despondent about the state of modern music journalism. But against the data-driven odds, Amanda Petrusich emerges as one of those rare lights that proves the show both will and must go on.
Currently a staff writer and the eminent pop music critic at The New Yorker, Petrusich’s oeuvre makes her perhaps one of the most important cultural commentators working today. In the common imagination, “the critic” is often the undeserving butt of pop-culture jokes, but Petrusich flips that script for the better.
In her hands, profile writing becomes a vehicle for empathy and exploration, rather than a regurgitated press release; criticism becomes a thoughtful ideal, rather than an anonymous statistic used as fodder for Metacritic.
When we talk through her Nine Songs selections, Petrusich is in the living room of her Hudson Valley home surrounded by an impressive, and vast, collection of records and books (because, duh). The room, from what I can see of it, is bright and inviting, much like Petrusich herself. All markers of a life well lived. Although Petrusich was raised upstate, she only returned to the area in 2021 after over a decade spent in Brooklyn.
“It’s been a couple of years, but it still feels very new. I live in a real ass house now!” she exclaims.
During those early years of her career, Petrusich wrote essentially everywhere. Pitchfork, GQ, Esquire, Spin, Paste – you name it. On top of all that, she also managed to churn out three nonfiction books and pick up a course teaching music journalism at NYU.
“I had various other jobs – full time, part time, whatever – and cobbled things together while writing for Pitchfork as a freelancer for years and years and years,” she says of her early days in the city. “You sort of grind it out, you really build those muscles. Those are days that I look back on fondly, but also with some sense of exhaustion.”
These days, Petrusich is still very much booked and busy. Right now, she tells me, she’s in the middle of reporting two in-depth profiles on buzzy and beloved acts, both to be released later this year.
“The way in which we consume music, the way in which we talk about it with each other, is changing constantly. So, I feel like it’s the critic’s job, in some ways, to find more and more useful ways to steer that conversation. This is the thing about this job that has kept it really interesting to me for a long time. I’ve been doing this for a few decades now, which is horrifying, but it just changes all the time and that’s kind of exciting,” she says with a laugh.
Petrusich tells me she was the type of kid who always had their nose in Rolling Stone or Spin or, really, whatever she could get her hands on. Pursuing criticism – once she realised it actually could be done professionally – was a natural extension of those formative interests.
“I was so grateful to those writers for cracking open my understanding of what a record was doing or even providing more qualitative language about whether it was succeeding or not at what it had set out to do,” she says. “Those things simply bolstered and expanded my love for and my interest in music and those artists”
In the introduction to her year-end album ranking for The New Yorker this past December, Petrusich offered a decisive defense of these sentiments. In an age where songs are assessed, more often than not, for their utilitarian appeal as background noise mood mixes or earworms for marketing campaigns and viral moments, it was a euphorically refreshing read.
“In my year-end essay, I was reaching this point where it felt like we were living through an anti-intellectual age, where the idea of applying critical thought to cultural objects was not being given a lot of respect as a practice,” she says. “I just wanted to say that there is still a utility to this work. I still think it’s important work. Music changes people’s lives, and anything that can bolster it, make it bigger, make it make more sense, add more context to it… I think that’s a beautiful, lovely thing, that I want to protect.”
“I wish more artists had a symbiotic – or maybe slightly less antagonistic – relationship with the people who write about their work. I wish they were able to understand that attention and care paid to a piece of art that you’ve created and released like that is love. Even when it’s negative or even when it’s critical, it’s coming from a place of admiration and seriousness,” Petrusich says. “I think it’s a gift to have your work treated with seriousness.”
For a life so marked by music, it quickly becomes clear that asking Petrusich to pick just nine songs to speak to – or, in a way, to claim – for this piece was maybe a torturous task. She kindly assures me it was also fun too.
As she describes her curation process – list writing and rewriting, conversations and comparisons and analysis during get-togethers with friends – I start to get this picture in my mind of a scientist dotingly and lovingly tinkering away in their lab. Each possible avenue her Nine Songs could have taken is described with wonder and excitement. Ultimately, the thematic North Star she settled on was herself.
“I tried to be really honest about nine songs that feel very essential to my whole gestalt. Songs that work on me musically but are also tied, in my mind or in my consciousness, to some sort of pivotal, tender memory or moment,” she explains.
“I’m at a place in my life where I’m really trying to actively, aggressively resist the idea to curate my own tastes, to present this thing that’s very balanced, diverse and charmingly eclectic and to push all that aside – the pressure to create a list that feels like an artwork – and instead do this other more raw and embarrassing and honest thing of, like, well this is it,” she continues.
“It’s something I talk about a lot, resisting the urge to like the thing that you’re supposed to like or the thing that’s cool and instead to just trust whatever emotional and alchemical thing is happening to you as you listen to a piece of music.”
Though our journey through her picks lasts well over an hour, it feels like it slips by in seconds. Listening to Petrusich describe each piece was like watching a live-action masterclass, and I knew I was just lucky to be along for the ride.
“Straight to Hell” by The Clash
BEST FIT: Let’s start with The Clash. This was such a fun one to dive into – it’s very addictive. Tell me about your journey with this song.
AMANDA PETRUSICH: The Clash are my favorite band, which people are sometimes surprised to learn this about me, because The Clash are not particularly confessional or sentimental or brittle, which are things I think I often seek out in music.
For me in general, as both a critic and a human being, I think I find ego very interesting. I would say that The Clash are almost egoless. Man, I fucking love this band, and “Straight to Hell” is my favorite Clash song.
They recorded this at Electric Lady in New York at the very end of 1981 in this sort of frantic kind of lunatic rush, and I feel like you can hear that looniness. It's an extremely unhinged song. The lyrics, I think, are about colonialism and immigration and steel mills and gentrification and Vietnam. But for me, it's really a song about alienation, feeling estranged and misplaced and unwanted. You're in the wrong place at the wrong time, and everyone is making sure you fucking know it.
Beyond the particular lyrical details of the song, which are very precise and very odd, it to me speaks of that feeling of being just a little bit off, and the ways in which that can be incredibly isolating and lonely. That being said, I feel like “Straight to Hell” is not really like a meaning song for me, by which I mean it's more a feeling song. It’s a song where I'm not necessarily responding to it in a particularly cerebral or intellectual way.
I feel like normal people talk about dancing around in their kitchen to Beyoncé, just dancing some shit out in a very primal and embodied way. “Straight to Hell” is that song for me. Late at night in the dark, you can find me doing some very, very, very weird moves to “Straight to Hell.” It’s just magnetic. The first time you hear it, you immediately need to hear it again.
How did The Clash become your favourite band? I love that.
It's a great question. This – like so many of the other songs on this list – is such a part of my blood and bones at this point that I can't remember that moment. With The Clash, it was probably late middle school, early high school. I was born in 1980, so I came of age mostly before the Internet.
Back then, I learned a lot about bands – this is going to sound very funny – from what the cool kids in my high school had on their t-shirts. Or going to the record store and buying one thing and having the very cool record store clerk be like, “If you like this, you should check this thing out.” It was like you were learning about things through word of mouth, through friends, things like that.
But, anyway, I have a very vivid memory of The Clash iconography existing, like on a shirt that one of the cool kids at my school was wearing. I was a very good student and a very responsible kid – I just read and did my homework. But I would watch the cool, burn out, dirtbag kids outside ripping cigs in their Clash shirts and leather jackets. And I'd be like, “That's fucking cool. I'm gonna go do my homework now!”
But that was so aspirational to me early on. I think I kind of made my way to The Clash that way. I probably heard “London Calling” or one of the more famous songs first, but I do remember it being very instantaneous, like love at first sight.
“Last Kind Words” by Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas
BEST FIT: I hadn’t heard this song before this interview, but as soon as I heard it, the hairs on my neck stood up. Learning more about it, I realised the history of this record and these artists is kind of a crazy mystery, too. How did this one end up on your list?
AMANDA PETRUSICH: There was a period in my life where I really didn't listen to any music made before 1945. It was a weird couple of years…
I really got the pre-war blues bug, and I got it real bad. I ended up writing a whole ass book about the oddball fraternity of 78rpm record collectors who keep this music alive (Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records).
This song is a very, very rare record, if we want to frame it in those terms. I think there's, God, maybe three extant copies of the actual 78 left in the world. Because of the way these recordings were made, there was not an archive. Now it's been digitally archived, but for a long time it existed only on those three physical copies.
Some days, I think this is the greatest song ever written or recorded. It’s spooky and it's heavy and it's haunted. It's supremely gorgeous. We don't know a lot about Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas, the two women who made this record. They cut this 1930 in Grafton, Wisconsin. They had likely traveled there from Mississippi or possibly Texas or possibly Louisiana.
The song has a lot of mystery in it, it might be about dying, or it might be about love. There’s this line where Geeshie sings: “What you do to me, baby, it never gets out of me.” I like to hear it as romantic, as a testament to the way we change each other, or the way that love is immovable and sacred and untouchable and immortal.
There are scholars and collectors who have essentially upended their entire lives in a kind of fanatical attempt to understand more about these women and where they came from, but I kind of like hearing the song without context, which sounds maybe like it's in opposition to what I was saying earlier about the utility of criticism offering context for recordings. With this, I like that it’s just the words and voices on shellac. It's this music that feels like an emanation from another plane. I feel like I don't need to know anything else about these women or who they were or how they lived or where they came from.
This song is just so transporting. I think everybody who hears it feels that experience you were saying of having the hairs on the back of your neck start to stand up a little bit.
That’s an incredible story. At a more macro level, what got you so deep into that era of music? What made you realise it was something you wanted to write a whole book about?
For me, it was when I first started to hear these recordings. I was so struck by the, you know, the immediacy of it, but also the unselfconsciousness of it. This is right at the dawn of the era of recorded music, and there was not yet a sense for the performers that they were creating an artifact or a document. Music was still this sort of lived, spontaneous thing.
So they'd end up in a recording studio and they'd play the song the way they would play the song at a juke joint or a party, or around a campfire or whatever. There was not necessarily the awareness that I think performers have now, which is, ‘The microphone is on and I'm making this thing that's going to outlive me.’ None of that was in the air. There’s something so deeply and aggressively human about that, which is always what I'm listening for.
I think we're all always kind of listening for that, right? That little glimpse of pure, unadulterated, unmediated humanity.
“Visions of Johanna” by Bob Dylan
BEST FIT: This next one on your list I feel shares that quality, in a way. This is such a classic. But I’m curious, of all the Dylan songs, why did this one make the cut?
AMANDA PETRUSICH: “Visions of Johanna,” is the best Bob Dylan song. I'm gonna say it! Hot take! That's not even that controversial of a take. This is a very beloved song, but I think his voice sounds almost unbearably beautiful here.
For me, this song contains everything. It’s one of the most complete works of art I know. When Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, people were getting really cranky and agitated about his bona fides. I remember wanting to just go around stapling the lyrics of “Visions of Johanna” to telephone poles around New York City.
It's not an easy song to parse. Like many of Dylan’s best lyrics, it’s a little obtuse, a little defiant. It’s a little bit out of reach. Supposedly, he wrote this when he was living at the Chelsea Hotel, and he had just gotten married to Sara Lowndes, and she was pregnant with their first child.
I think you could kind of hear that in his voice, that moment of transition, maybe not in an explicit way, but just the sense of something ending and something beginning. I think it's a song about longing and feeling like you're stuck between the past and the future. You know: “We sit here stranded, though we're all doing our best to deny it.”
It’s a feeling I need to check in with a lot, you know? It's like, you get older and things change, you lose people along the way, and then new things happen. There’s a beauty to that and an ecstatic possibility, but there's a lot of sadness and a lot of grief, and I think this song is really clear about that.
How do you make sense of a song like this? It’s essentially an epic poem of a song. As a listener, how do you tackle that?
I'm such a lyrics person, I think to a fault. I love language. I'm a writer, you know?! I tend to hyper-fixate on words and on narrative. But I think Dylan – even though his songs are obviously famously literate, and he is one of our best known and beloved lyricists – is not easy. Like, the lyrics don't always make sense. They're have all these strange leaps in time and perspective.
I feel like Dylan himself – through my listening to his records – taught me to be okay with that. Or, at least, to recognise the ways in which that really reflects lived experience, which is linear but is not necessarily coherent. It's like our days are unfolding, and sometimes things make sense and sometimes they don't.
I think Dylan helped me learn to be okay with that and to understand that as, in fact, very real and very true.
“Homemade Songs” by Bobby Charles
BEST FIT: This is a name that, aside from “See You Later, Alligator” many are mostly unfamiliar with. How did you come to love Bobby Charles and, specifically, this song?
AMANDA PETRUSICH: I think Bobby Charles is, unfortunately, not nearly as famous as I believe he should be. Bobby Charles is a Cajun born singer and songwriter from Louisiana, known for pioneering a genre that gets called – kind of dumbly – swamp pop. This is not a swamp pop song. I think “Homemade Songs” is maybe one of the greatest country songs ever written.
It's my favorite down and out lament. I love the line where he sings: “I only know one thing for certain / That I've been down so long I'm hurting.” To me, that’s a perfect country lyric, even though this song has a little bit more going on genre-wise.
You can hear and feel the exhaustion in his voice, but also simultaneously. a kind of peace. I love the feel of this song. I love the feel of his self-titled record, this soft, stoned, gentle melancholy. I've had months where I have listened almost exclusively to Bobby Charles, because all other music felt intrusive and overwrought to me. I feel like this song is a mission statement for how to live a certain kind of life, just getting stoned and singing homemade songs. It's like, what else could you want from your days?
I love that you describe it as a “stoned” kind of feeling. It’s so true.
Yes, there’s a smokiness or a haziness to the production. And also, there’s the languid drawl in his voice, which is maybe a little bit of a Louisiana way. This song slows me down. It’s a very useful drug for me in that way.
Do you have any specific moments with this song that you can remember where you’ve needed this song like that?
I lived in New York City for 17 or 18 years before I moved upstate, like we were talking about earlier. Sometimes in the summer I would hit this wall where you just think, “I can't be in this fucking town, I have to get out of here.” I think this is true of many New Yorkers. It’s almost like a panicked desperation.
A few years ago, my husband at the time and I started renting a little cabin up in the Catskills in a little town called Phoenicia. It was a weirdly cheap Airbnb, and we would go hang out there for two or three weeks every summer. I would often go up a week or two early by myself, just to write, hang out and reset the general angst and anxiety of living in New York.
Bobby Charles was just the sort of thing I needed there. I would get up there, start breathing the mountain air, start not looking at my phone, and start listening to Bobby. Slowly, my whole body would unclench. It was an antidote to the pace and rush of New York. Bobby sounds so unhurried. That's his whole thing, even though some of these songs are sad. there's a lot of deep longing and sadness in them.
But it was just that feeling of we don't need to rush through our days, you know? In New York, rushing is built into the psychogeography of that city. This song helped me.
“I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever)” by Stevie Wonder
BEST FIT: What a cut from Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book. What does this one mean to you?
AMANDA PETRUSICH: Stevie Wonder is maybe the best to ever do it. I have this thing where I sometimes get very intense cravings – almost like bodily cravings – to hear certain records. This is probably the way a normal person would crave a hamburger, or whatever. It’s like my body is telling me, “You need protein,” only my body is telling me, “You need Stevie Wonder.”
The other day, I just woke up, sort of obsessed with hearing this song. I have an old vinyl copy of Talking Book but as happens with vinyl – which degrades over time – I had played it too much. It got all fucked up and basically unplayable. So I made a very panicked call to my local record shop – shout out to Hudson Valley Vinyl in Beacon – to see if they had a copy in stock. It was like calling my drug dealer.
The owner, Chris, is an amazing guy and also someone who gets what it's like to obsessively require music. I called him, and he was like: “Is this an emergency? Do you need me to drive it to your house right now?” Once I got the record from him, it satiated me immediately.
I think the chorus of this song is one of my favorite choruses in all of recorded music. It feels to me like that moment where you're on the runway and the airplane is lifting off the ground, and you're kind of like, “Okay, what the fuck? I guess we're flying now!” It’s just the sheer weightlessness and magic of that moment.
I think the song is about the beginning of a love affair, where it’s all possibility and potential and its nothing real. It’s that feeling where you tap into what it means to be a person, to be capable of love and how completely bizarre and rare and magical and intoxicating that feeling is.
My husband passed away a few years ago, and there’s another side to this, I think, which is also in a way about getting over a heartbreak and becoming aware that maybe there’s something on the other side of that devastating loss.
It reminds me of a line from “Gypsy” by Fleetwood Mac, where Stevie Nicks sings: “Lightning strikes, maybe once maybe twice.” This song is all about the maybe twice. There’s that personal resonance for me.
“Cannonball” by The Breeders
BEST FIT: This is just a supremely cool song. I played it for fun with some friends of mine in a band not too long ago, and it’s just awesome.
AMANDA PETRUSICH: Totally. It’s very easy to fixate on the bass line here, which is obviously an all-timer. But, honestly, for me it’s the whole thing that I love.
It's that little drum bit where it sounds like Jim MacPherson is playing the rim of his snare drum with chopsticks or something. It's that very small, brittle sound. It's that crunchy ass guitar riff. It's Kim Deal’s, phrasing, delivery and tone. I just love this song.
I was 13 when “Cannonball” came out, so it contains kind of my entire adolescence. This song is whatever we mean when we say alternate, “alternative rock” or “90s music.” I think this whole record emerged from a very pure place. I think Kim Deal is a serious artist, and I don't think she was getting what she needed from Pixies, which is a band that I also love. She was driven, almost compulsively, to write and record her own music, which is an impulse I identify with.
I remember interviewing the band for a Spin cover story. This was maybe in 2013, or somewhere around then. I think it was the 20th anniversary of Last Splash, and we did the photo shoot at a swimming pool in Williamsburg.
I remember the first time we met, were all in swimsuits, although I think they were wearing wet suits. Anyway, I remember Kim deal talking about, right before this record came out, quitting her full-time job as a defense contractor in Dayton, Ohio, to go on tour.
She talked about feeling terrified by the uncertainty and the tumult of the whole thing, and the rock and roll lifestyle. And I remember her saying something to me like, “I'm a girl, I don't need to be on stage to get laid.” There was this other thing drawing her to music that was not ego. It was not like an appetite for fame or sex or whatever it was. It was just this feeling that she really needed to be doing this. She really needed to be making music.
She released a great record this year, so obviously, it's still like very alive for her, that feeling and that need. But I remember as a 12- or 13-year-old, just thinking it was so fucking cool to see a girl in a badass band that had a huge hit.
“Life on Mars?” by David Bowie
BEST FIT: This is one of those songs that feels like a euphoric “yes!” to me. The lyrics are so interesting and complex, but what does this song do for you?
AMANDA PETRUSICH: I mean, I could have picked so many Bowie songs. I knew there was going to be a Bowie song on my list, and it was so hard to pick just one. But Bowie has said this song was inspired by Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” which is another song that I’m obsessed with. Bowie has also introduced this song on stage as a love song. I feel like neither of those facts truly make sense to me, I can’t square either of those things with the song itself, but that’s Bowie, right?
I love how sprawling and inscrutable this track is. Mostly it’s associated in my mind with the very end of 2019, just before the pandemic. I was very lucky to have been awarded an artist-in-residence spot at Headland Center for the Arts, which is an amazing arts organization inside Golden Gate National Park in California. It’s on the literal edge of the world. You’re on these cliffs overlooking the Pacific.
I was living in old army barracks, and there was no WiFi and no cell phone service. At the time, Pacific Gas Electric was doing these controlled blackouts because of the wildfires, so the power was also often going off. And I’d just spend all day compulsively writing by a window, because that was the only way you could see anything, and I would listen to “Life on Mars?” on repeat. It kind of worked with the otherworldliness of the landscape.
I liked the tension between the smallness and intimacy of the experience I was having – living off the grid and writing all day – juxtaposed with the bigness of the song. The other thing about “Life on Mars?” is it’s an entirely different song every time you listen to it. And it was fun to interact with that in my bubble. What does this music mean? Why is it so fucking good?
As I’ve said, sometimes I get in this zone where there’s only one thing I want to hear. For a while, that was “Life on Mars?”
“I Wanna Be Your Dog” by The Stooges
BEST FIT: This is a classic. It was released as Iggy Pop was moving away from being Jim Osterberg and becoming this new version of himself with The Stooges.
AMANDA PETRUSICH: I’m obsessed with The Stooges. It’s amazing. The absolute and utter lawlessness of this record is so moving and extraordinary to me. It makes me feel like I just stuck my finger in a light socket.
It’s just three chords, and it’s John Cale of The Velvet Underground plunking out that one piano line over and over again. It’s like being in an insane asylum. I’m a pretty think-y person, but this song is just unadulterated, visceral feeling. It’s urgent and it’s awesome, and sometimes I need to manually lock into that. This song does that for me.
Also, Iggy Pop, although he is a very famous and highly regarded artist, I nonetheless think he is a visionary and genius and misunderstood and underestimated. He’s one of our greatest living artists.
The first profile I ever wrote for The New Yorker was Iggy Pop. I flew down to Miami, and we spent three or four days together driving around in his Rolls Royce Phantom, which is still the nicest car I’ve ever been in. We were swimming around in Biscayne Bay, and I don’t get star struck too often, but it was certainly a moment where I was just bobbing around in the water and I looked over and it was Iggy fucking Pop! My soul left body. I would say he was shirtless maybe 75% of the time we spent together. He’s incredibly funny and very kind, but he’s also a very serious person who thinks deeply about the world and his art.
Also, I’d never written a profile of that length before, and I was very nervous about getting it right. If I can be pretentious about this for a moment, I feel like the best profiles almost feel like a kind of classical portraiture. You really want to capture some true and ineffable thing about a person – who they are, what it feels like to be around them.
Of course, your loyalty is always going to be to your readers, but I think you also want the subject to recognize themselves in the piece. It’s not coal mining, but it is very hard work to get the story of someone’s life right. Iggy made it really easy. He’s really open and smart.
What an experience. It’s so cool that you got to soak up that time with him and also that he was so receptive and open in return.
I’m sure you’ve met musicians like this, or people like this, where you’re like, “I will catch up to you 40 years from now.” He’s so far ahead of his time. To this day, that was probably one of my favourite reporting experiences. He was so gracious and taught me so much
“Sunday Morning” by The Velvet Underground and Nico
BEST FIT: What a special song from a unique and weird little album. Why this song?
AMANDA PETRUSICH: My daughter’s name is Nico, and she was born on a Sunday morning. This song is sort of pulling a double duty for me in terms of personal significance. It’s a song that reminds me of her a lot every time I hear it.
For most of my life, having a baby was not a thing that I thought would interest me, though it turns out, for me, having a baby is actually the most interesting thing in the world. It sounds almost stupid to say this out loud, but giving birth was one of the most instantaneously and profoundly transformative things I’ve ever done.
To be clear, you can have a very full and rich, complicated, glorious and beautiful and meaningful life without children. But for me, the moment of having a baby was a very fucking wild thing that was very unexpected, and I was very nervous about it. I was nervous about parenthood in general. This song, for me, is all tangled up with that memory, the moments right after my daughter’s life began.
I remember very little about that morning, other than the physical sensation of holding her and my mind was so amazingly blank, except for this song. “Sunday Morning” is actually a very sad song. It’s about coming down from amphetamines and feeling this gnawing, limitless regret. It’s definitely not a song about the glory of new life. But it does have a very sweet feel to it, and it’s always going to occupy this very tender and unprecedented moment.
I’ll always associate it with meeting my daughter for the first time and thinking of nothing else except the lyrics to “Sunday Morning.” One day she’s going grow up and realise it’s about drugs and be like: “What the fuck!”
Sorry if this is so raw…
Not at all. I totally get it. Not that I have a baby, but I get how raw that experience must be. And also, it’s so cool your daughter is named Nico. It’s almost like she’s now destined to be cool in life.
I never quite know how to answer that question. It wasn’t a direct line, but she was definitely how the name came into my vocabulary. And my daughter is very cool. She’s doing it right.
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