🎵 Music findings #15

Hello everyone, and welcome to issue #15 of Music findings. A band that wanted to bin its biggest single, a producer who only came round because a tape got stuck in his car, and a composer who threw out most of Vivaldi.

🎵 Songs

• M83 — Midnight City — that squealing lead riff isn’t a synth, it’s Anthony Gonzalez’s own voice distorted. Then a sax solo he admits is a cliché, and the song needs anyway:

• Kings of Leon — Sex on Fire — Caleb Followill thought it was terrible and nearly dropped it. Number one in the UK and Australia, and a Grammy.

• Ace of Base — All That She Wants — Denniz Pop wasn’t sold on the demo until it jammed in his car’s cassette player and he had to keep hearing it.

• Arctic Monkeys — Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High? — AM’s 3 a.m. text-message song, with the title arriving as the comeback.

• Max Richter, Daniel Hope — Spring 1 — from Recomposed, where Richter says he discarded 75% of Vivaldi’s material. Two and a half minutes, Hope on a 1742 Guarneri:

• Shaboozey — A Bar Song (Tipsy) — J-Kwon’s 2004 Tipsy dragged into a honky-tonk, and nineteen weeks at number one, level with Old Town Road.

• Natasha Bedingfield — Pocketful of Sunshine — the song Emma Stone calls the worst ever in Easy A, right before making it her ringtone.

• Dennis Lloyd — Nevermind — one of 35 songs Nir Tibor wrote during a year in Bangkok, remixed into the version that passed 900 million streams:

• Calvin Harris, John Newman — Blame — Newman pitched himself over Twitter and sent a demo with the vocal already on it. Straight in at UK number one.

• Abor & Tynna — Baller (nowifi Remix) — Austrian siblings who sang for Germany at Eurovision 2025 and came 15th, then went top five in Germany, Austria and Switzerland anyway.

🎧 Play them all — the full playlist, where the next issues pull from too:

🗂️ Catch up on past issues.