Fall for the sounds of our Autumn issue playlist

From the pages of our latest edition, a soundtrack to accompany shorter days and longer nights

As the leaves reveal their colours and the evenings draw in, our Autumn edition (Abre numa nova janela) comes with a playlist designed to match all moods. Expect intimate piano ballads like John Legend’s All Of Me, soaring anthems such as Little Mix’s Power, and reflective storytelling in Margo Price’s Hands Of Time. From cheeky defiance in Tim Minchin’s Naughty to the raw edge of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Ain’t No Easy Way, each track captures a moment, a mood, or a story. Whether you’re wrapped up with a warm drink or out chasing autumn light, there’s something here to soundtrack the season...

ALL OF ME

“John [Legend] went to the piano and played two chords and sang, ‘All of me, loves all of you.’ He said, ‘That's all I have. I'm not sure what to do next.’ I said, ‘Well, let me try.’ So, I sat at the piano, I thought of my wife and her curves, her edges, her perfect imperfections. And I sung, ‘Love your curves and all your edges, all your perfect imperfections.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, that's great. Let me get back to the piano.’ So, he went back, and that's how we wrote this entire song, really quickly. What we usually do is to start with the chorus. I always like to start a song with the takeaway. Like, if you listen to a song and, tomorrow, the next day, you think about what you heard, you might remember something, and that bit that you remember, I want to find that before I start writing a song. So, we already had, ‘All of me loves all of you,’ and then we added to it. Then, very quickly we had the whole chorus.” — Toby Gad

SPACE MAN

“Well, we were in Livingston Studios in London. This was still in the throes of coming out of lockdown. Amy [Wadge] lives in Wales, so she didn't travel down; she was on Zoom. And then I met someone who's a very close friend now, Max Wolfgang. We'd never met each other. I'd heard of Amy's work, but Max was quite new on the scene. We take the laptop out to the live room, pop it on top [of the piano], Max plays some chords and Amy says, I really want to write a song about space man, cleverly using the words ‘space’ and ‘man.’ In my head, I was like, ‘That's tough. How are we gonna do that without it being a bit naff. But it was just written in 10 minutes.” — Sam Ryder

HANDS OF TIME

“I remember the day that that song was finally born. I had been working on it for a really long time, and had a completely different melody that was more up-tempo and it wasn't gelling. I didn't have the chorus line, or the, ‘cruel hands of time’ line. I was down in my basement, and I was getting so frustrated because I knew the words were really good. I just couldn't find the right cradle for it... That song's been so good to me. I love singing it. It's so cathartic, and it says everything that I needed to say. Even back in those days, the men caused me problems and the drinking caused me grief [as per the lyrics] - I was still drinking at that time. Now, looking back at it in hindsight, that was just my way of getting some things off my chest.” — Margo Price

POWER

“We wanted to make something that felt empowering and something that felt anthemic. Camille [Purcell] and I wanted it to feel fun and free.  A lot of those verse lyrics we're just kind of in the moment - being heard just singing to each other in the room. It was more of the energy that we wanted to kind of create, that we fostered in the room with each other. And then she went on the mic and I went on the mic. It’s anthemic, an absolute anthem, with that girl group kind of power. Growing up, I loved the Spice Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed — strong female leads. Any song that captures that ‘female not taking any shit’ energy, I love. Power does that so well. It feels triumphant and strong. I’d definitely put it on in the Uber or getting ready for a night out.” — JHART

ROCK & ROLL QUEEN

“I can remember writing the initial idea for Rock & Roll Queen on the acoustic guitar, it was at my niece's birthday party. I must have been 16 or 17, and I just started singing this idea at her. We were all sat around having beers and Coca Colas and all that kind of stuff. Me being me, I'm just jamming away. I'm playing Nirvana and Green Day. I'm playing Blondie. Then, ‘You're my little rock and roll queen,’ which eventually became, ‘Be my little rock and rock queen.’ It was nice and simple and just had three chords. We were at rehearsal a couple of weeks later, and we started to flesh it out.” — Billy Lunn (The Subways)

NAUGHTY

“You have to understand, ‘Okay, Matilda wants to sing about this there, so what sort of song is that?’ Naughty - it's defiant and cheeky and childlike and hopeful in the face of oppression. But it's not yet a revolution song, because that's still to come, and it should harmonically relate to something. Naughty is harmonically exactly the same as When I Grow Up, which I wrote first, but which you hear later. You have to take into account the big journey, you can't go up song, up song, up song, or chorus, chorus, chorus. It needs to have a dynamic that supports the audience's emotional journey. It's a much trickier puzzle, but it's not that different.” — Tim Minchin

AIN’T NO EASY WAY


“The hootenanny stomper song became more of a rocker than we’d expected. A lot of these songs are about being at the end of your rope, and we weren’t in great shape at that time: we’d run out of money, we’d lost our drummer, lost our record deal, and every single label rejected the album except for Ashley Newton at RCA, who finally allowed us to put the album exactly as was. That was our saving grace. He was literally the only way out, and that shit wasn’t easy.” — Robert Levon Been (Black Rebel Motorcycle Club)

TO HAVE SO MANY

“It’s not a complicated lyric, by any means. It was however the first love song I wrote that didn’t make me cringe. Writing purely from the heart without putting your conscious mind in the way can make for surprising and honest lyrics. I’ve always felt that love is something that flows like a river and if you’re open to it, you can get carried away in it. That’s what the lyric, “So let us hurry on like a river newly sprung/And I’ll love you ‘til one of us has gone/Wherever we may go,” is about. People fall in love and either stay together or drift apart, but it’s so important to feel that you’re in love with someone or something.” — John Smith

QUIT HOLLERIN AT ME

“We talked for a while, and the subject came up of how the commercials on TV were always louder than the show you’re watching. Quit Hollerin’ At Me came falling out of us easily, with a second verse about a nagging wife and a third verse about a relentless restless mind. We had fun making a work tape, and it was a great way for us to start co-writing.” — Gary Nicholson

TAKE OFF

“I really like offbeats! In my song Take Off, the guitar holds down a slow, steady rhythm, but in verse two, I sing off the beat with lines like, ‘As we rise up, as we speed up.’ It creates tension that’s released when the chorus lands solidly on beat one with the phrase, ‘Bye, Hello.’ It’s a subtle way to shift the energy and make a melody feel more alive.” — Bonniesongs