It's the Ryan Lairn Show on WNYC. I'm Amina Cerna, filling in for Brian today.

We're kicking off our last segment of the show with a little bit of Dolly Parton.

You just heard a clip from the iconic working woman's anthem, 9 to 5, a song which has lodged itself so deep in the American psyche that it's kind of hard to imagine a world without it.

In fact, the same could be said of a lot of Dolly's songs, probably.

So it comes as no surprise that she made it onto the New York Times' recently published list of, quote,

the 30 greatest living American Songwriters.

Yeah, they narrowed it down to only 30.

To close the show today, we're using that as a jumping off point to do some informal,

unofficial listmaking of our own.

Listeners, we want to know.

Who would make your personal list of greatest

living American songwriters? Emphasis on the living. Sorry to the Leonard lovers out there. I'm

talking Bernstein and Cohen. But yes, your nominee has to be alive, has to be American. Who makes the cut? Let us know. 212-433 W-N-YC. That's 212-433-9-6-9-2. You can also text that number.

My guess for this is Lindsay Zolads. She's a pop critic at the Times and she writes the music newsletter, the amplifier.

She was one of the 250 music insiders and critics who voted on the Times' list.

And she also wrote another article in the Times titled,

11 great American songwriters who didn't make our list. Maybe because the American songbook defies limitation.

So we're going to unpack how she weighed her picks, what got left out, and what makes a songwriter truly great.

Lindsay, welcome to WMIC.

Thanks for having me.

All right, listeners, again, we're taking your calls on this question.

Who would make your own personal list of great living American songwriters?

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