Hey, I'm Brian Hyatt, and this is Rolling Stone Music Now.

This amazing, entirely delightful year is nearly over.

2020, our favorite year, all of us,

and that does give us an opportunity to look back

at the best songs of 2020.

Rolling Stone has done our annual list of the 50 best songs of 2020.

It's set in stone.

It's out there. You can read it online and we thought we'd go through our official

list maybe some individual picks and I have with me John Dole

Brittany Spanos, and Rob Sheffield.

Hey, hey.

Hello.

So let me start, John, since you put together this list, ultimately ultimately as the reviews editor. What struck you overall about these

50 songs and this musical moment of 2020 as expressed through songs as opposed to albums which is

another list that we will probably grapple with in a future episode.

One thing that struck the way we do it is everyone on staff sends in their top 20 songs and then their albums too.

And I think what struck me this year was the amount of consensus.

A lot of people really loving the same things. And I think you see sort of I guess two threads

coming out of this which is one is songs that really feel you know reflect how

this year felt which was songs that are kind of dealing with trauma dealing with difficult stuff and

then songs that help us escape. It was like a really good year for like retro disco songs and

good year for like house music and good year for things like that

...