Pod Insights Pop Culture Happy Hour Halloween Songs About this episode Who's the Mariah Carey of Halloween? Every year we hear many familiar Halloween songs – from the Ghostbusters theme to “Thriller” to “Monster Mash.” But beyond those Halloween staples, what’s next? Today we've got an episode of NPR’s All Songs Considered that offers up a new canon spooky season songs – from the truly terrifying to autumnal and nostalgic.
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0:19 Stephen Thompson? Halloween is almost here, and you've maybe started hearing those familiar Halloween songs that resurface every year. Your Ghostbusters theme, your thriller, your Monster Mash. But beyond those Halloween staples, what's next? I'm Stephen Thompson, and I recently joined my pals on NPR's All Songs Considered to come up with a new canon of songs for spooky season. Here's host, Robyn Hilton.
0:45 Speaker 02 It's All Songs Considered. I'm Robyn Hilton. I'm here with NPR Music Editor Hazel Sills and our correspondent for all things A Mile Wide and An Inch Deep, Stephen Thompson.
0:58 Stephen Thompson? NPR dilettante correspondent.
1:01 Speaker 02 Host of New Music Friday, also with Pop Culture Happy Hour. Stephen, the idea for this year's Halloween episode is yours, so maybe you should set this whole thing up for us.
1:13 Stephen Thompson? Well, it's interesting. One of my beats at NPR is the Billboard charts. If you look at the Billboard charts in late October into early November, you'll see, like, all of a sudden, Ray Parker Jr.'s greatest hits hits the album chart. Michael Jackson's greatest hits or the album thriller really pop up. There's sort of a number of Halloween staples that have started to form a Halloween music canon beyond the song "Monster Mash" by Bobby Boris Pickett. And what I pitched to Robyn and what I wanted to discuss with you all is, let's agree on a more expansive Halloween music canon.
1:55 Stephen Thompson? What songs do we want to see pop up around spooky season? That are true to the season, but also are not just novelty songs, are not just like, gather around my boys and ghouls, you know, but like actually spooky songs that are, that rule.
2:14 Speaker 02 So we've got a number of categories we're going to do to sort of winnow down what kind of songs belong in the Halloween canon. I thought we would start with songs that are truly terrifying, not the goofball songs.
2:28 Stephen Thompson? Right. All right. Well, I'll kick us off. Not a terribly old song, but this song is genuinely spooky. It's also beautiful. It's also just by one of, you know, my favorite singers to pop up in the last decade or so. It's the song Killer by Phoebe Bridgers.
2:43 Speaker 03 Sometimes I think I'm a killer. I scared you in your house. I even scared myself by talking about Dahmer on your couch.
3:00 Stephen Thompson? I think part of what's creepy about it, first of all, it is a, it is a gloomy song. It is, it is a song that feels autumnal. I think a lot of the horror and kind of the horror icons that speak most to me have a certain level of like, of humanity to them. This song felt true to that. It felt like, it has this intimacy, but it's like a whisper about murder.
3:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, there's a spooky kind of, almost like normalcy to this song, like what she's expressing about, do I have the capacity to do the kinds of things that I'm singing about?
3:35 Speaker 02 Sometimes the most terrifying thing in the world is your own thoughts.
3:40 Stephen Thompson? I mean.
3:40 Speaker 04 Totally.
3:41 Speaker 02 Right?
3:41 Stephen Thompson? And who are you talking to, Robin?
3:45 Speaker 02 But she, and, and I think specifically the fear of not being in control of your own thoughts and actions. And that's something that she alludes to in the song. So Killer from Phoebe Bridgers, that's from Stranger in the Alps. It came out in 2017. We're going to add that one to the canon. Hazel, what do you want to add? And this is for the category, Songs That Are Truly Terrifying.
4:09 Speaker 04 A song that I thought of when you mentioned this category is the song If I Had A Heart by the artist Phoebe Ray.
4:36 Stephen Thompson? That is such a good pick.
4:38 Speaker 02 Yeah.
4:38 Stephen Thompson? It is so unsettling.
4:40 Speaker 02 Everything Fever Ray.
4:40 Stephen Thompson? I'm just sitting there, the whole time I was, the whole time I was listening to it, I was like, who are you gonna call?
4:46 Speaker 04 It's creepy. It's just like, you know, costumes and spooky images and ghosts and monsters are just such a big part of the Fever Ray project. And I think aside from the instrumentals of this music, the way it's so foreboding and it, it almost feels like, like a Western score. It's like, I feel like I'm walking down a dark road. The lyrics are so terrifyingly opaque. It's like, if I had a heart, I could love you. And you know, it's this kind of almost like creature is singing about how much they want more and more. And it's like, well, more of what?
5:22 Speaker 02 I mean, everything Fever Ray does is terrifying to me. The videos, videos too, when you say some sort of creature, that's the spirit and even the, the physical form that they inhabit in their videos, right? They're always monstrous.
5:35 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
5:36 Stephen Thompson? That is such a good entry in the Halloween canon. That's exactly what I'm talking about. I want to see Fever Ray pop up on the Billboard charts every October.
5:47 Speaker 04 Yeah.
5:48 Speaker 02 Well, I think the thing that's interesting about the Billboard charts and this whole thing becoming a thing right now is that the cynical side of me immediately thought of how labels just want to capitalize on this, this thing that they're seeing. They, they start to see like, well, wait a minute, if, if Thriller's popping up on the charts this time of year, maybe we really need to be releasing more Halloween themed music, just so we can really capitalize on this. And then I've already taken it as far as, well, Fever Ray will never get the attention that Fever Ray deserves because the oxygen's going to be sucked up by all the pop stars and the big, big labels and everything trying to capitalize on this market.
6:30 Stephen Thompson? Halloween's gotten too commercial, man.
6:32 Speaker 02 It's just too commercial.
6:33 Speaker 04 There's too many spirit Halloweens.
6:36 Stephen Thompson? It used to be about the fear, man.
6:41 Speaker 02 All right, we're doing these categories. The next category is.
6:45 Stephen Thompson? Ghosts from your church.
6:47 Speaker 02 Childhood. No, nostalgia. Let's just, let's just take a nostalgia trip here and talk about the songs, regardless of whether or not they're scary, that really take us back to the magical time of our youth when maybe Halloween resonates the most with us.
7:03 Speaker 04 I feel like the music that reminds me the most of my childhood Halloweens, or just, you know, spooky times in my childhood, which were a lot of times, is the Goosebumps theme song, the theme song to the TV show Goosebumps. And I should clarify that I'm a millennial, so I'm a child of the 90s. And this song, just, it lives so large in my brain.
7:44 Stephen Thompson? Hazel currently running out of the studio in there.
7:48 Speaker 04 Actually, this song, it really slaps, like, as a piece of music.
7:51 Stephen Thompson? Yeah.
7:56 Speaker 02 So Goosebumps, that was your jam growing up? This is like, instantly takes you back to your childhood?
8:00 Speaker 04 Instantly it takes me back. I watched so much Goosebumps. I read the Goosebumps book series by R.L. Stine. And I feel like it was, it was like the Twilight Zone for being a child in the 90s. And it was scary. Some of those episodes were, even to this day, I'm like, that was kind of a lot for, for children's television.
8:20 Speaker 02 So I know about Goosebumps, but I've never seen it. I mean, I know it's like, I think it had a reboot. I think there was a movie.
8:28 Speaker 04 There was a movie. I don't think I saw the movie.
8:30 Speaker 02 Movie.
8:31 Stephen Thompson? And really like epic, extremely state of the art special effects.
8:39 Speaker 04 You know what? I, yes, yeah, really state of the art. I mean, at least it wasn't all CGI, I can say that much, but.
8:46 Speaker 02 Well, I want to go next because I have something that also instantly takes me back to my childhood. And this actually isn't even a song, but it is synonymous with spooky season to me. And there, there are people of a certain generation, I think, when they hear this, they'll instantly know what it is.
9:03 Speaker 05 One dark and stormy night, a light appears in the topmost window in the tower of the old house. You decide to investigate, and you never return.
9:19 Speaker 02 So this is from 1964.
9:22 Speaker 04 OK.
9:22 Speaker 02 It's from an album, but it was played all through the 70s and 80s. It's the album.
9:28 Speaker 04 Played where?
9:28 Speaker 02 OK, so this is an album from Disneyland Records called Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House. For people of a certain age, this was inescapable. It was a Halloween tradition. Any haunted house you went to, it was playing. Any Halloween party you went to, it was playing. Or just trick or treating, you'd go to someone's house and invariably they'd have this playing on a record player on their front porch, or you could hear it coming from inside the house.
9:57 Stephen Thompson? I definitely heard this in passing on several different front porches.
10:00 Speaker 02 Yes.
10:01 Stephen Thompson? Mentor, Ohio and Iola, Wisconsin.
10:03 Speaker 02 Yeah. So the first half of the record, it's these little stories with that narrator. And every track is a new scenario, you know? But then the second half of the record is just the sound effects, you know, no narration or whatever.
10:19 Speaker 04 I feel inspired, honestly, to just start playing this in my home at all times. Like, I actually, I'm like, oh, this would be great ambiance for like dinner parties when people come over. Yeah.
10:31 Stephen Thompson? Like, was it just brought out for trick or treaters?
10:34 Speaker 02 I mean, for the most part, but I had my own copy that I would just put on. Because I just.
10:39 Stephen Thompson? I mean, I was the same way with The Chipmunks Christmas.
10:42 Speaker 02 I mean, because, I mean, you know, we, Stephen, we do the goofy holiday show every year. That whole thing that we started more than a decade ago, that was my baby that I started because, just because I love all the sound effects and I love doing all the
10:55 Stephen Thompson? You have always loved the sound effects record.
10:58 Speaker 02 All right, we've got to take a quick break here, but we'll have more songs for the new Halloween canon right after this. And you're listening to All Songs Considered from NPR Music.
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12:20 Speaker 02 It's All Songs Considered from NPR Music. I'm Robin Hilton. I'm here with Hazel Sills and Stephen Thompson. And we're talking about songs for a new canon of Halloween music. Well, let's talk about new songs, because that's one of the categories. We did nostalgia. We did songs that are truly terrifying. Let's talk about some of the new stuff that's come out that we think belongs in the canon.
12:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, I was thinking about this compilation that was released this year by an artist I wasn't familiar with. Her name is Oksana Lind. She's like a Venezuelan composer. And she mostly made stuff like from the late 80s to the mid 90s. And I want to play a song of hers called "Horizontes Lejanos."
13:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, very John Carpenter. Like, I could, I could hear this during a scene of like The Thing, that movie, The Thing, or one of his films. So Oksana Lind is totally new to me, too. You know, she, I guess, started recording as far back as the 1980s, but didn't put out an album until just a few years ago.
13:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's crazy that we don't, like, we haven't heard this before because it just feels so ethereal and weird and like twisted. And I feel like you could play this music on the porch when the trick or treaters are coming up if you wanted to.
13:51 Speaker 02 Nobody would stop. They would just keep walking.
13:55 Speaker 04 Yeah, there's just such a sense of dread to this song. Kind of like the Fever Ray song that we played earlier. You know, just feeling like I'm being pulled into this other world.
14:06 Speaker 02 So that's from an album that just came out this year called Travicius from Oksana Linda. Stephen, what do you got for something new to add to the canon?
14:14 Stephen Thompson? Well, I think this song is pretty clearly engineered specifically to be part of the Halloween canon. And I happen to think it does a phenomenal job of it. Florence and the Machine, there's a new album coming out on Halloween. And the first single from it feels so Halloween friendly. It is called Everybody Scream.
14:54 Speaker 02 You know, I hadn't thought of it until hearing this song in the context of this conversation we're having. But this song has that borderline goofy, super theatrical kind of melodrama to it that I hadn't quite clocked until hearing it. Like even the organ sound at the beginning, you know?
15:11 Stephen Thompson? I think the difference is she's committed. She gives a committed vocal. And I think there, she's not coming in there like, I am here to suck your blood. She's like singing the hell out of it.
15:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:25 Stephen Thompson? And like letting the instrumentation do the work of, you know, kind of the organs. And it's spooky and it's a little silly.
15:33 Speaker 04 I get the sense that she is creating this themed fantasy. And she is existing within it as the artist that she already is. Like this, this song, you know, with the organ and, you know, it has these kind of like Halloween hallmarks. And it's clearly pointed towards the holiday and has a purpose. It doesn't feel that out of line with her catalog or the work that she already makes as an artist.
16:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, her music's always had drama.
16:03 Speaker 04 Yeah.
16:03 Speaker 02 And been very. Very theatrical and And kind of an undercurrent that's a little creepy.
16:08 Stephen Thompson? Well, and when we're talking about who is the Mariah Carey of Halloween, this is clearly a bid for that. And I would be remiss if I if I failed to mention that Lady Gaga has a new song called The Dead Dance.
16:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:19 Stephen Thompson? Which has a video directed by Tim Burton. And she's like a creepy rag doll. Kind of
16:26 Speaker 02 Twitchy jerky.
16:26 Stephen Thompson? Twitching around to this very Halloween coded song.
16:31 Speaker 02 So we'll add that one to the Halloween canon. Florence and the Machine, Everybody Scream. Brand new song for the something new category that we're we're adding to the canon. I'm gonna pick a song by Ethel Kane.
16:43 Stephen Thompson? Yeah.
16:43 Speaker 02 A song called House of Psychotic Women. From the sort of weird one off album that Ethel Kane did at the top of the year. Perverts. Called Perverts.
17:12 Speaker 02 Again, there's that contrast, like the music is so unnerving. And she's saying, I love you over and over again. So creepy. And and all the words are kind of buried. Like they're kind of coming up from underground or something.
17:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, Ethel is just such a master. You know, she's so young, but she's such a master already in her career at this very kind of specific strain of American Gothic music in a way that I feel like so few artists make. She is just so good at creating these desolate, like haunted houses of songs. Like, there's so much going on in there, even though it feels quite minimal. And yeah, I mean, this is music that truly scares me, actually.
18:04 Speaker 02 So the song "House of Psychotic Women", with I think all the E's are missing from that, and it's all one word. "House of Psychotic Women", from "Perverts", from Ethel Kane. Just came out at the top of this year. All right, we've got one more category to talk about, and that is the Mount Rushmore of Halloween songs. These are the songs that are so undeniable, such classics, that they belong on the Mount Rushmore of Halloween songs.
18:33 Speaker 04 So this song, total classic to me. I think should be on the Mount Rushmore of Halloween music. I'm curious to know what you guys think. When I think scary Halloween music, I think The Cramps. I think of that is a band that is basically like, they're giving monsters, they're giving, they, every day is Halloween for them. And so I wanted to play their song, "I Was a Teenage Werewolf".
19:16 Speaker 02 The sleight of hand that this song pulls off is that it's got just a hint of camp to it.
19:22 Speaker 04 Yeah.
19:22 Speaker 02 Which you could totally imagine this scoring a truly horrifying moment in a film, or haunting your dreams.
19:30 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's like, it's not Monster Mash, it's not thriller. It's like dialed down enough in that like campy vampiric energy that it's cool. Like, they are, at the end of the day, this punk rockabilly group. There's a costuminess to it, and there's like a goofiness to it, but it's not over the top. It's not Party City.
19:54 Stephen Thompson? Right. It's a more dialed down, "Scream and Jay Hawkins, I put a spell on you", right? Like, it's going hard instrumentally, but it's not shrieking at you.
20:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, I could see this on the Mount Rushmore. But who is going next to The Cramps, Stephen, on this Mount Rushmore of Halloween songs?
20:14 Stephen Thompson? Well, when we're talking about the Halloween canon and the songs and albums that kind of come back and chart every year, I'm always shocked that one of those isn't a duo from 2009 called Dead Man's Bones. Dead Man's Bones was the duo of a guy named Zack Shields and a fella you might have heard of named Ryan Gosling.
20:38 Speaker 02 And little someone.
20:39 Stephen Thompson? Little someone. And feeling very Paul Harvey, like, "And that little boy whom nobody loved grew up to be Ryan Gosling."
20:49 Speaker 02 That's a terrible imitation.
20:50 Stephen Thompson? It was terrible. That didn't sound anything like Paul Harvey at all. But basically, Dead Man's Bones, these two friends, one of whom happened to be Ryan Gosling, you know, they grew up obsessed with Halloween, grew up obsessed with haunted houses and the haunted mansion ride at Disneyland. And they made an album together in 2009, and they made a bunch of Halloween-themed music, including this song, which belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Halloween music. It's called "My Body's a Zombie for You."
21:38 Stephen Thompson? Yeah, and like, it has an A-list superstar at the head of it.
21:42 Speaker 02 But he wasn't at the time. I just was checking out his filmography. Like, he had done a handful of things. He had done The Notebook.
21:49 Stephen Thompson? The Notebook.
21:49 Speaker 02 The Notebook.
21:50 Stephen Thompson? By that point, it was definitely...
21:52 Speaker 02 But, but, his career did not really take off until like 2010, 11, when, you know, when he did Drive and...
21:58 Stephen Thompson? I mean, but like, you look at the play count on Spotify, and that song has been played like eight million times.
22:04 Speaker 02 Wow. Yeah. Well, mine is one that could have gone in the nostalgia category as well, because, well, I think you'll hear why.
22:31 Speaker 02 The Great Pumpkin Waltz, Vince Guaraldi from The Great Pumpkin.
22:35 Speaker 04 Classic.
22:36 Speaker 02 Absolute classic. I think admittedly, it's not quite the level of A Charlie Brown Christmas. Maybe not that instantly recognizable, but no less a classic.
22:46 Speaker 04 Yeah, I grew up watching all of the Peanuts, like the Christmas special, the Thanksgiving special, the Halloween special. Had so much affinity for the Halloween special where I laugh every time, even to this day, when Charlie Brown goes trick or treating and he gets a rock.
23:02 Speaker 02 I got a rock.
23:03 Speaker 04 I got a rock at every house. Everyone else gets candy. That's still like the funny. It's so twisted and sad. Why would you give him a rock?
23:12 Stephen Thompson? You just keep a bowl of rocks in case Charlie Brown shows up.
23:15 Speaker 04 Every time. Yeah, no, I, this, this also could have gone in the nostalgia bracket for me because I just, I love this music so much.
23:25 Speaker 02 So we'll go out on this then from Vince Guaraldi, The Great Pumpkin Waltz from The Great Pumpkin. Stephen Thompson and Hazel Sills, thanks so much to you both.
23:34 Speaker 04 Thank you. Thank you.
23:36 Speaker 02 And for NPR Music, I'm Robin Hilton. It's All Songs Considered.
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