Fever Ray, The Beaches, Patrick Watson, more: The Contenders, Vol. 13

All Songs Considered

NPR

Music

4.4 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

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Summary

The latest additions to our list of the year's best songs include a joyful new banger from The Beaches, a wondrous tapestry of sounds from singer Patrick Watson, twisted pop from Fever Ray and more.

Featured artists and songs:
1. The Beaches: "Last Girls At The Party," from 'No Hard Feelings'
2. Patrick Watson: "Peter And The Wolf," from 'Uh Oh'
3. Deb Talan: "A Glimmer In The Grass," from 'I Thought I Saw You'
4. Fever Ray: "I'm Not Done (Therapy Session)" (single)
5. Ethel Cain: "Nettles," from 'Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You'

'All Songs Considered' 25th anniversary segment: Our No. 1 songs from 2016

Weekly reset: A day at the beach

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Did you see that news about the aha singer, the lead singer?
0:02.8	Yeah, he, what is?
0:04.9	He's got Parkinson's, yeah.
0:07.0	Morton Harkin.
0:08.2	Which, I mean, I mean, that's awful.
0:10.1	But it's actually what he said about it that really hit me, and I've been thinking about it ever since I read this quote from him about it.
0:17.7	He said that he's totally fine accepting the diagnosis.
0:23.0	And he said that he takes inspiration from his dad, who it's like it does 90s. And he said that his dad's whole thing is that
0:29.9	like as you get older, he said, you just use what still works. Right. Use what still works. I don't know.
0:37.3	I found that really, really inspired.
0:38.9	It made my shoulders kind of lower in a way, you know?
0:41.1	I think we spend a lot of our lives sort of fearing horrible things and fighting against them.
0:47.3	And if you just sort of like think, okay, I'm going to roll with this even though it's awful and I'm just going to I'll use what I can. I don't know.
0:55.7	I found that super inspiring. Yeah. I mean, I think controlling what you can control is a really
1:01.4	useful mantra for getting through life. And if you think about just the accumulation of just time
1:07.9	and energy that we waste in our lives worrying about things.
1:11.1	Oh my God.
1:12.1	So this is a theme, I think, in this week's show.
1:16.1	Every time we pick these songs for a contenders episode, all these questions come up and
1:20.4	sort of recurring themes.
1:21.6	And I think one of the things that ties a lot of the songs together that we're going to talk
1:25.2	about today is like like how do you manage
	...

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