Mark And Sarah Talk About Songs

We're taking a quick break before the emotional press of the Sweet 16 to talk about a handful of "off-label" comebacks: award-winners, kids' songs, comebacks only we noticed, and more. We wonder whether it's possible to have been too big to truly come all the way  back ; we contemplate a truly catastrophic remix of self-loathing; and we bemoan sad computers, unfortunate spiritual-title p...

Mark's spreadsheet of history has spoken: we're choosing the rest of the Do Call It A Comeback season's Sweet 16 this week! From the top of the pallet of improbable late-'80s comeback songs, we're surveying the joyful geeky dance of Robin Gibb, the 20 percent of our income we owe to Duran Duran, the most tiresomely groovy Ben & Jerry's flavors, Canadian spellings, and what's playing when we're...

The Round Of 32 is underway! After a brief chat about our head-vs.-heart processes in this round, we descend into the valley of the shadow of twos: struggling to come up with the word "metamorphosis," confronting the history of Auto-Tune, measuring levels of exposure to Britpop, and planning a community-college class on interpretive dance. Everybody's got their Limburger, we also learn -...

The last 15 songs have entered the comeback fray, along with Nickelodeon dominance, stinky vocals in classic songs, what Clive Davis is drinking while he waits for artists at a crossroads, perfect blends of horniness and intelligence, and what happens when you drop John Belushi's Joe Cocker imitation in a vat of AI. Should Bob Dylan live in a saguaro in Joshua Tree and other questions for the ages...

It's the second half of the first round, and some of our toughest choices yet, as we struggle with how comebacks used to look in a monoculture; human Razzie Awards; the comeback-osity of an "X featuring Y" track; why J. Lo never seems to be having fun; weird H.W. Bush presidency detritus; returns from '70s banishment; and what exactly we have to do to get fake fade-outs in pop songs outl...

The next 15 songs in our definitive-comeback-song season storm the booth! Sometimes the song is coming back to the podcast from a previous season; sometimes our  lunch is coming back on us thanks to cynical bongo glurge; and sometimes we're wondering if there's a portrait of Jeff Lynne in an attic somewhere? Execrable album-only tracks, the supergroup conundrum, market forces' inability to control...

What is the most representative comeback song in pop history? Our Do Call It A Comeback season will find out...and we have been here for years, thinking about the philosophical definition of a comeback, great creative leaps forward, when B-plus vocals lead to A-plus artistry, the middle-school melodrama of '70s supergroups, savvy collaborations, and how MTV brought the '60s into the Reagan era. Pu...

It was a winding road from our #FirstNameBasis finale to our favorite jock jams, but we hope y'all ARE ready for this contemplation of sporty hype tracks -- as well as county fairs, Snuffy Smith, Yankee Stadium's unpredictable PA loyalties, which song is the ur-JJ, the apparent international exchange program at work in early JJ albums, early-'90s rappers who are both ignorant of and apathetic towa...

Whoooo's number ooooone? (BA BA BAAAAAA!) That's not a spoiler, by the way, so you'll have to listen to our First-Name Basis finale to find out which name song is the most iconic of all time -- and also what SDB's grandma called farts, differing sources of iconicity, listener testimony from an Eileen, which song has a reliable narrator, and when the "M" in "MILF" stands for &qu...

The rankings only get more challenging as the First-Name Basis season confronts its Top 20 -- as well as iconic pop numbers, Jersey "law," unholy mash-ups of finalist songs, the cease-and-desist letter SDB should expect any moment now from Laura Branigan's estate, and your co-hosts ranking themselves 21st at remembering to play all the clips. Liza, Yoda, "Cocaine," and avant-ga...

Welcome to the intermission of our First-Name Basis season -- in which we're contemplating important songs with more than one name in them, and ranking them, too! And while this ep is dropping in the middle of the season, we actually recorded it first, so if it seems like we're working through our metrics for what's iconic when it comes to name songs...we are! Time is a flat pop chart! We're also...

We're finishing out the Top 40 in our First-Name Basis season with an all-timer set of 10 songs: all three of the songs your co-hosts and their husbands picked to win the whole season, and the diabetic garbage that's been torturing SDB for decades. We're also discussing mall anchor restaurants, the peak period of cinema-storyline videos, enduring bobby-soxer cuteness, startlingly low chart perform...

"Mark and Sarah: why ya buggin'?" Why  aren't we buggin' in the third ep of our First-Name Basis season: the weird fade-out during Barry Manilow's "Mandy"-ending glory note, "Mary"-song vote-splitting, SEO retitling, cheerleader moxie, the all-killer-no-filler pop charts of 1984, and Reality Bites as a crystal ball into adulthood. We're also craving Girl Scout cookies...

The second batch of 10 songs is raising tough questions for our First-Name Basis season, like: Does difficult subject matter preclude a song from moving on? How can you tell if a songwriter has never lived in NYC...and how drunk WERE the Kingsmen? Would Rick Springfield REALLY just pine for some lady? We also fondly remember You Can't Do That On Television , pay tribute to Weird Al Yankovic, and s...

Our First-Name Basis season is underway! Our mission: to identify the  most iconic song associated with a first name. But how? It starts right here, as we look at the first 10 in our FNB Top 40 and decide which songs/names move on to the next round. Along the way, we make predictions, remember  Just One Of The Guys and  American Crime Story , stand too close to you with Chardonnay breath, re-scan...

The Record Of The Year Showdown comes down to this...and there's not a ton of surprises here, probably, but there IS the wall of history, the wisdom of (drunk, stoned New York City) crowds, shared musical language, the "Somebody" multiverse, and Sarah's zombie mom. So, you know: Monday. Everyone's a winner in the battle of head vs. heart as we crown a ROTY champion in our season finale....

Mark's shenanigans aside, we had an easier time ranking our semifinal group than we'd expected -- but we didn't necessarily expect to go on a sentimental journey with TLC, Sarah Palin's nephew LARP Jr., cutesy Aretha, braided beards, and an open invitation to Gotye to come on/edit the podcast. But a full moon and Sarah's all-covers clip choices put us on the emotional road to our season finale. Do...

"This'll be cinchy! [ cut to: sobbing ]" We thought we'd have a more straightforward time of our quarterfinal rankings, but alas, no. We did have a Whitney-koan reader mail, a visit from Katharine Hepburn, the aural equivalent of a sped-up Bob Ross episode, and music-minister shout-outs before Julio got the stretch and carted off four more beloved songs. Grab a fine-tooth comb and join u...

More like the BITTER-sweet 16, the episode that forces hosts and listeners alike to make terrible choices, as well as rank things politically, salute album-cover pets of yore, choose which Adele hills to die on, pit Henry Mancini against Leonard Nimoy, mourn the consensus "blech," and dodge the ire of John Ramos whilst deploying Emilio Estevez fist-pumps. Is today a "Beat It" d...

The Round Of 32 is a plot-heavy affair: Coldplay premonitions, beautiful German cheese, learning to love advisedly off-putting pop, and songs that grab you by the nip. As the decisions get more agonizing, Aunt Doreen punches Grampy Blankenship in the face, and we discover that the ghost in the machine is -- and will continue to be -- Whitney. Get ready to scramble a goose egg; it's the second half...

The Round Of 32: where the choices get tougher and the cheeses get lonelier. We're writing  Back To The Future /Babybel fan-fic, analyzing palimpsest layers, appreciating Bobby Darin's interpretive skills (and apologizing to Jerry Orbach), and wondering who's going to do a better job of seducing Sarah, Mrs. Robinson or Toto. What song is a red-wine drunk? Who burned off their eyelashes in seventh...

It's the final section of our Record Of The Year Showdown Round Of 64! The Grammys get more of a clue, albeit seemingly by accident, here in the 21st century, and we're talking about that, plus the late Shows Of Note, editorial thrills in dinosaur/country-fiddle pairings, farts over a xylophone, our favorite generic bands, the schmaltz hinge point, songs that need their videos in order to work, an...

We're heading -- somewhat angrily! -- into the 21st century in our third Record Of The Year Showdown episode. Spanning 1991-2006 at the Grammys, our discussion also looks at early-nineties quality control lapses, celebrations of the dusty past, nestling in the Swiss-y holes of pop cheese, seventh-grade-dance melodrama, special categories for Whitneying and Mariahing, "psyyyyych!" noms, a...

The Record Of The Year Showdown enters the second "bracket" section with winners from 1975-1990, which means a lot of flashbacks to our America's Damp 40 season; theories about Billy Joel and Rufus Wainwright; Eagles/color-blindness test metaphors; underappreciated dad-bod pop stars; how a cult implicated Steve Winwood; and the necessity of special categories to contain nuclear waste lik...

Welcome to our Record Of The Year Showdown season! With listeners' help, we're going to find out which Grammy-winner for ROTY is the best of the 64 winners to date...or maybe just the least baffling and unconscionable. How are we doing this? It's sort of a bracket; we'll explain up top, and then we'll talk about cobwebby rocking chairs, how anyone managed to get laid during the Eisenhower presiden...