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The Best Songs Ever ... This Week, Feb. 9, 2018

Mengwen Cao
/
KUTX
Tune-Yards perform at the KUTX birthday bash at Bass Concert Hall in 2015.

The staff at our sister station, KUTX, scour the earth to bring listeners the best music. Each Friday, they share three of their favorite songs on Morning Edition.  

"Heart Attack" by Tune-Yards

We’ll start with Merrill Garbus, the New England native who records under the name Tune-Yards. She is a brilliant DIY savant, sampling and layering her parts not as a gimmick, but as a means to make her intense and creative music. In the five years since her last album, Merrill spent some time DJ'ing in clubs, and this has helped untie some of her rhythmic knots. 

"She May, She Might" by Yo La Tengo

Hoboken, N.J., trio Yo La Tengo is one of the few – if not the only – bands that have managed to keep their music fresh and interesting in a career that has spanned well over three decades. The band's upcoming release, There's A Riot Goin' On, is their first album of all-new material in five years. As stylistic chameleons, Yo La Tengo strives to never repeat themselves, and on "She May, She Might," they nestle in somewhere between chill and abrasion. 

"Inverness" by Marie/Lepanto

Closer to home, Austin's Will Johnson, leader of the much-loved '90’s Texas band Centro-Matic, is back with a new project. Don’t look for it under his own name, though. Like his work with Monsters of Folk and Overseas, Johnson is collaborating again, this time with fellow songwriter Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster. They’re calling the project Marie/Lepanto, named for a pair of towns on the Arkansas-Missouri border where both singers were raised.

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