Episode
Musical Musings: #USAtoZ Picks
- Podcast
- New Zealand Net Radio
- Published
- Aug 10, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4315
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://www.nznetradio.net.nz/podcast/#ep-84
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Summary
Today on Musical Musings we do something gloriously different. Rather than one band and five songs, my guest Jarrett McCall arrives with an alphabet. Jarrett recently took on a challenge organized by @metaphoralaura on X — the hashtag was #USAtoZ — to run through American bands letter by letter, A to Z, and this episode is his pick of the ones he chose, every one of them, by his own happy insistence, drawn from the 1970s. He’s titled it USA A-Z (Missing Some!), and the “missing some” is the whole charm of it: we get C, D, F, H, J, L, P, R, S, V and W, and cheerfully skip the other fifteen letters. What that leaves is less a greatest-hits run than an accidental map of a whole decade — in the space of an hour Jarrett’s alphabet sweeps up power-pop, Akron art-rock, Miami Latin disco, arena rock, P-Funk, Detroit folk, New York synth-punk, California hard rock, Alabama soul-rock and lush LA vocal-group pop. We travel in order down his list, and it’s a wonderful whiplash of a journey: Cheap Trick’s teen anthem “Surrender” gives way to DEVO’s Brian Eno-produced “Gut Feeling,” then Foxy’s Miami groove “Hot Number,” Jefferson Starship’s “Jane,” Parliament’s “Ride On” from their love letter to Washington D.C., and the astonishing “Sugar Man” by Rodriguez — the Detroit songwriter who was a superstar in South Africa and Australia without ever knowing it, as the film Searching for Sugar Man later told the world. From there it’s the confrontational electronics of Suicide’s “Keep Your Dreams,” Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” (a song Eddie wrote as a punk parody), and Wet Willie’s loose Southern strut “Weekend.” Then comes Jarrett’s cheeky twist for the final two, filed not by band name but by album title: the Beach Boys land under H for Holland, the record they famously flew t…