STEPHEN TO ANNE MARIE:

SB: What is your favorite song?

AM: Adrenaline by K. Roosevelt got me good. It’s Happening by Dirty Nice.

SB: Have you heard any of these tracks before?

AM: Not the tracks, only Smiles and Aretha.

SB: Fall is just around the corner. While the summer groove is still going strong right now, a few leaves will start to drop and before you know it, you'll be sipping on your Pumpkin Spiced latte and grabbing a scarf before heading out the door. For me, there have always been a few songs/artists/albums that start to make their way into the rotation as the weather cools off. What about you?

AM: This is tough for me to answer. In LA, there’s really no fall (sob), so I’m a little out of the loop on the fall state of mind. Growing up, I tended to think of cold weather as cuddle weather. I have no idea why but even as I get older, winter still feels like relationship season. Two people meet and decide to do a holiday together. They take someone home to meet their families. It’s an interesting time. Personally, I think winter has the most possibility in terms of music because you can play something really dope like hot jazz and steam up a small apartment dancing with your friends or you can walk around in the cold air or ride the subway alone and listen to Sister Winter by Sufjan Stevens or Fleet Foxes or Patsy Cline and contemplate where you are in life and where you want to be. In the summer, everyone’s playing something with a beat to fire things up and get the green light to put their hands on someone else (cue Next, Too Close). In the spring everyone’s looking forward to summer.

But we’re talking about fall. Fall…fall is my favorite season. So I’m a little selfish with my music. Fall doesn’t bring out any specific kind of music for me. Fall just makes any kind of music I already like that much better. I’ve got some wonderful New York memories of riding the subway to bartend on 57th listening to Ra Ra Riot. Same thing with The Strokes. I was so, so late to the party on them but that just made it even better because I was roaming around New York thinking I was the only one able to enjoy them that much because they were only brand new to me. Wild Belle. Someone introduced me to The Weeknd in November of 2012 on a perfect Saturday Night. Miley’s Bangerz album got me through a project up in Napa in the fall of 2013.

I try to take a mental snapshot of my life when I fall in love with a new sound. My surroundings, my state of mind. I like to look forward from that moment and imagine where I’ll be next and what I’ll be listening to and then be able to sit here now in the future and look back and see where I was then.

ANNE MARIE TO STEPHEN:

AM: What is your favorite song?

SB: I'm just going to exclude Aretha from this question because we all know she's THE queen and any time she's in the conversation, everyone else should just pack up and go home. So outside of her, I've got to give the edge to Pull Up by Nicotine's Famous Honey. Not sure if it was intentional or not, but you punched me in the face right off the bat this round with that little number and I'm still trying to move past it. 

AM: Have you heard any of these tracks before?

SB: Jenn Champion's O.M.G. and Light by San Holo I've heard before. Otherwise, all new. Well again, except for Aretha. 

AM: You and I spend a lot of time talking about movies and music and the intersection of these two forms. It always stands out to me when a show or a movie has a great soundtrack. I'm setting aside composers right now and speaking strictly about music supervisors and how they put the right recipe of tracks together for a movie. God love them. Now, I want you to think about a movie that underwhelmed you but that gave you a great love affair with either one song or a group of songs. What was the movie? Why did it underwhelm you? What were the songs? When did you know it was love at first listen?

SB: This is a really mean question because my mind starts going to all the good movies with great scores/soundtracks. 500 Days of Summer, Tron Legacy, Collateral, the list goes on. Underwhelming movies...hmmm...Whiplash...even Mr & Mrs Smith had some great music. Wait, I think I found one, but it's somewhat of a copout. It's Man On Fire with Denzel. While I do really enjoy that movie, it actually ended up underwhelming me. Mainly because of the overproduction. Too many lens flares. Too much saturation. Could have had a much grittier vibe, but instead it looked like it was part of the Transformers trilogy. Anyway, towards the end of the film, a song plays by Lisa Gerrard and it's amazing. She's amazing. When it starts playing, it's during a really sad/beautiful moment right when (spoiler alert) Denzel dies. And this song and her voice and his death reminded me of another moment that sounded similar...in Gladiator. Turns out, she's the same artist singing in the background when Russell Crowe dies. And as soon as I figured that out, she instantly became one of my favorite movie musical voices and someone that you should definitely get in touch with if you're ever trying to bring the tears out of your audience.