New Wet Leg, Sufjan Stevens, more: The Contenders, Vol. 7

All Songs Considered

NPR

Music

4.4 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Wet Leg is back with another burst of wildly infectious, frenetic rock. We've got that, the original version of an Oscar-worthy Sufjan Stevens song, and some music that NPR's Tom Huizenga says is "better than Xanax."

Featured artists and songs:

1. Wet Leg: "Catch These Fists," from 'moisturizer'

2. Ashley Jackson: "Unrest," from 'Take Me To The Water'

3. Sufjan Stevens: "Mystery of Love (Demo)," from 'Carrie & Lowell (10th Anniversary Edition)'

4. Alexander Knaifel: "Stanza I-VII," from 'Chapter Eight'

5. George Xiaoyuan Fu: "Passacaglia on a Theme by Radiohead," from 'Colouring Book'

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This message comes from MintMobile. MintMobile took what's wrong with wireless and made it right.
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0:12.2	See for yourself at mintmobile.com slash switch.
0:16.2	Hey, everybody, thanks for waiting for this week's all songs Considered. We've got a brand new cut from
0:21.4	Wet Leg that we're super excited to play for you, and we weren't able to share it until
0:25.7	1.30 Eastern today, so we thought it was worth the wait. That's coming right up, along with a
0:32.0	previously unreleased Sufjohn Stevens track from his Carrie and Lowell recordings,
0:36.5	and we continue to celebrate the 25th
0:38.6	anniversary of all songs considered with a look back at our number one songs from each of our
0:43.2	years doing the show. We're up to 2007. So keep listening for that. But first, I want to do a
0:49.5	quick follow-up on last week's show where we talked about some changes coming to the South by Southwest
0:54.7	Music Festival. And in case you missed our conversation or the news, it is that starting next year,
1:02.1	the music part of the South by Southwest Festival will essentially be folded into the film
1:07.7	and interactive festivals that historically have happened about around the week
1:13.5	before the music part of the festival. I mean, there's always been overlap between all of the
1:19.2	events, but they're now all going to happen at the same time in a single consolidated week.
1:31.7	And after our episode went out into the world, there were some listeners who took issue with how we described or characterized these changes, that we made it all
1:38.5	sound much more dire than it really is, and that it all kind of came off as a premature funeral for the festival.
1:47.8	One of the listeners we heard from is actually James Minor. He is the VP of the South by Southwest
1:53.8	Music Festival, and he's here now to talk more about it. Hey, James. Hey, how's it going? All right. James, you know, you and I,
2:03.3	and NPR music and South by Southwest, we go way back. Yeah. We put on a lot of shows at the
2:09.9	music festival over the years. You and I would work very closely together to book all of those
	...

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