music

12 Days of Girly Juice 2019: 10 Perfect Sex Songs

Kate Sloan

Music is important. It’s a love language, a mood-setter, a spirit-lifter. When nothing else can make me feel sexy, music often can – which is part of why I highlight 10 of my favorite sexy and sex-adjacent songs for you here every year. Here are my 2019 picks! (Want to listen to all of these songs, as well as previous years’ faves, in one handy playlist? Here you go!)

Kid Bloom – Different State of Mind

Sinking right into the crimson clouds / Waiting for this thing to spin me out / I’m swimming in my head

This song is the musical embodiment of what it feels like to sit and people-watch in a park on a sunny Saturday while stoned off your ass. It’s slow and trippy and relaxing and makes me feel like everything is right in the world (a rare feeling these days). It’s also perfectly suited for sex, especially a languorous, lazy fuck on a weekend afternoon when you have nowhere to be but in bed and nothing to do but each other.

Kehlani – Honey

I like my girls just like I like my honey: sweet / A little selfish / I like my women like I like my money: green / A little jealous

I knew I liked Kehlani’s voice when I realized I’d Shazam‘ed the same song twice – this one – upon hearing it in public. Both times, I was struck by the feeling of needing to know who this masterful, smoky-voiced singer was. Kehlani sounds gorgeous in this song, like she deeply understands the feelings of love and sex and relaxation and can convey them directly from her own brain to yours, like an injection.

Carly Rae Jepsen – Everything He Needs

Soft rain / We roll the windows down / Sweat disco all night / It’s clear / We’d like to fool around / His hands reach for mine

Carly Rae is essentially the patron saint of unrequited love, so it’s rare to hear her sing an uncomplicatedly romantic song about someone she’s actually (presumably) dating/fucking. Maybe that’s why this song stuck out to me so much on my first listen-through of Carly’s latest album. This tune is like if Barry White and Carly Rae did a collab; I didn’t know how much I needed it to exist until I heard it. (Carly also, notably, released the ode to masturbation “Party For One” this year – but tbh, I like this one better.)

Bruno Major – Like Someone In Love

Sometimes the things I do astound me / Mostly whenever you’re around me

I mostly knew this jazz standard from Blossom Dearie’s adorable version. Bruno Major gives it an R&B update here, magicking this 75-year-old song into something new and sparkling. I think if a baby boomer and a millennial collaborated on an album specifically for ~romantic interludes~, it would all sound like this song: classic, yet seductively modern. It’s the sort of thing almost all of us can agree on.

The Japanese House – We Talk All the Time

We don’t fuck anymore / But we talk all the time, so it’s fine / Can somebody tell me what I want? / ‘Cause I keep changing my mind

Maybe it’s weird to say that a song about no longer wanting to have sex with your partner could be sexy, but what can I say – Amber Bain is a babe, and her songs are gorgeously sensuous. I have so many faves from her latest album, Good At Falling, but this is probably the one I’d most like to fuck to. The rhythm is driving, the lyrics are dark and sweet, and Amber’s voice is as pleasingly raspy as ever. I need the Japanese House to release, like, eight more albums, stat.

Tegan and Sara – Hold My Breath Until I Die

Shame on me / ‘Cause I can’t help falling at your feet / It makes me mad / To see you leave like that

I would not normally describe Tegan and Sara’s music as sexy – I mean, T&S themselves are, obviously, but their music isn’t always. However, this song has breath-play undertones (even if Tegan is actually singing about romantic anguish rather than kinky sex), and I’ve never heard Tegan’s voice sound sexier than when it goes a little breathy and plaintive in the verses of this track. I think if she sang me this song in person, I would faint…

Daniel Caesar – Japanese Denim

My blue jeans / Will last me all my life, oh yes / So should we

This romantic slow-jam makes me want to slow-dance in the dark with someone whose body fits nice with mine, which is kind of the gold standard for sexy songs, isn’t it? Daniel’s voice is like luxe purple silk. And he’s Canadian, like me!

Great Grandpa – Favorite Show

Laughing at myself again / I’ll zone out til I’m dying / I’ll zone out til I’m dead

I went through a period this year where I would wake up every day with this song stuck in my head. I don’t really know what it’s about; I just know it’s calming in its repetition, and it has the type of gently rocking rhythm that works really well for fuckin’.

Her’s – Under Wraps

I feel like I ran with a headstart / And you’re only just starting to live / Got a lot to gain / Not a lot to give

I only found out about this band because they tragically died in a car crash this year. My brother Max texted me about it, sad and shaken up, his own band having just played in a music festival with Her’s. Stephen and Audun sound angelically beautiful on this slow-grooving, sensual track; their octave-wide harmonies feel as old as time. Put on some good headphones and work your way through the Her’s discography – it’s a lovely (and kinda sad) way to spend an afternoon.

Alina Baraz – To Me

I’m not asking for too much / I’m asking the wrong motherfucker / Just ’cause we’re in love / Doesn’t mean that we’re right for each other

Alina makes it onto this list every year (literally… every… fucking… year), because she truly makes some of the sexiest music in the biz. If I’m having trouble getting into the mood to bone down (increasingly a problem for me as I get older, achier, and more ace), putting on some Alina tunes always helps at least a little. This song isn’t even particularly sexy – it’s more like “sad with a side of sexy” – but Alina sounds just as ethereal and captivating on it as she always does, which is to say, very.

 

What were your favorite sexy songs this year?

5 Frank Sinatra Songs That Are Definitely About Kink

Kate Sloan

I’ve Got You Under My Skin

The addictive, all-consuming qualities of love often described in these Tin Pan Alley-era love songs remind me so much of my kinky relationships. Modern-day dating is so much about “chillness,” or the illusion thereof, that it’s refreshing to hear these old-fashioned confessions of feeling utterly un-chill. I’ve mostly experienced this “I’d sacrifice everything, come what might, for the sake of having you near” level of devotion in kink dynamics, not vanilla relationships.

The moment that really kills me in this song, kink-wise, is this: “Don’t you know, little fool? You never can win. Use your mentality. Wake up to reality.” In the narrative of the song, it’s the voice of Frank’s own anxiety and inadequacy whispering this to him – but it’s also something the most merciless humiliatrix might spit at a submissive. And it makes me feel all tingly. Oh, Frank.

Can I Steal a Little Love?

This is pure submissive Frank. “Hug me, kiss me, til I’m red,” he sings, “til my eyes bug out my head.” Consensual violence ahoy!

Later in the song, he swears, “With a smile, I will lead you down the aisle. I won’t even need a shove.” He’s talking about marriage, sure, but it’s also this super subby promise that he’ll happily do things other men find scary or uninteresting, because he’s so devoted to his darling. Aww.

Fly Me to the Moon

This charming classic reminds me of how immersive and otherworldly kink can be. Unlike vanilla sex, it takes me out of my head and makes me feel like a temporarily different person in a temporarily different place – like I’m in outer space.

“Fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars,” he sings. “In other words: baby, kiss me.” Oh, swoon.

Somethin’ Stupid (featuring Nancy Sinatra)

Look, it’s a little weird that Frank Sinatra sang a romantic duet with his daughter. Asked about the song 40 years after it was recorded, Nancy said, “Some people call that the Incest Song, which I think is, well, very sweet!” What a strange non-response, perfectly in line with the overall strangeness of the song and its enduring popularity.

Setting aside any implications of actual incest between Frank and his daughter – of which I haven’t seen any suspicion or proof – this song makes me picture Ol’ Blue Eyes as a Daddy dom. Several of my favorite Daddy dom tropes are based in traditional 1950s masculinity: well-tailored suits, protectiveness over women, shellacked hair, an easy and assumed dominance. That type of gender dynamic was less than consensual in actual 1950s nuclear family units (well, most of them, anyway), but it’s hot to imagine consensually reclaiming it in a contemporary context. And handsome Frank would make a hell of a father figure.

My Way

When I told friends I was working on this post, they all insisted I had to include this song – because what could be a more dommy sentiment than “I’ll do it my way”?!

However, examining the rest of the lyrics, there’s not much of kinky substance in this tune. I think what makes me think of dominance, moreso than the lyrics, is the calm confidence with which Ol’ Blue Eyes performs this big, showy song – and that same confidence when it shows up in karaoke aficionados’ performances, since this is a mainstay of that genre. Listening to this song stiffens my spine with pride and surety, so this shy little submissive can get a taste of what it might feel like to be a whole-hearted dominant.

What are your favorite kink-tinged jazz standards?

My Top 10 Favorite Songs About Marriage

Kate Sloan
The closest thing I have to a photo of me in a wedding dress.

I’m a romantic sap and I don’t care who knows it. I cry at Hallmark cards, I sob whenever I watch the episode of The Office where Jim and Pam get married, and I certainly weep profusely at real-life weddings. What can I say?

I once briefly dated someone who edited wedding videos for a living, and he frequently lamented how boring certain songs get after a while. (You would not believe how many millennials want Bright Eyes’ “First Day of My Life” to feature prominently in their nuptials. Or maybe you would.) That said, wedding-related songs still get me all choked up pretty much whenever I listen to them, whether they’re about beautiful brides for marriage, or offbeat vows, or an oddly-romantic desire not to get married. Here are 10 of my faves…

The Magnetic Fields – It’s Only Time

Why would I stop loving you a hundred years from now?/ It’s only time/ What could stop this beating heart once it’s made a vow?/ It’s only time

This is my #1, play-this-at-my-wedding, first-dance-contender, most romantic song ever. I once sang it and played it on the ukulele in Malta while my cousin walked down the aisle; she hadn’t heard the song before I presented it as an option, but she quickly fell in love with it, as did basically the entire wedding party. Stephin Merritt is a brilliant songwriter, blessed with the ability to write lyrics that are quirky and quixotic sometimes, and utterly classic and simple at other times. This song is of the latter type – it feels, somehow, like it has always existed, since the birth of love.

Rosie Thomas – Wedding Day

I’m gonna stop at every bar/ And flirt with the cowboys in front of their girlfriends/ It’s gonna be so great/ It’s gonna be just like my wedding day

This isn’t actually about a wedding – it’s kind of about a rejection of romance and an embracing of self-love instead, with Rosie sweetly breathing lines like “I’ve had enough of love; it feels good to give up, so good to be good to myself.” But your relationship with yourself is so deeply rooted, so permanent and important, that it may as well be a marriage, am I right?

Tegan and Sara – BWU

All the girls I loved before/ Told me they signed up for more/ Save your first and last chance for me/ ‘Cause I don’t want a white wedding

I have a long-standing theory that Tegan Quin is anxiously attached (to use the parlance of the psychological concept known as attachment theory) while her sister, Sara, is avoidantly attached. You can see the difference easily if you know which T&S songs are written and sung by each sister: Tegan’s songs tend to be desperate “I want you to love me/Why don’t you love me?!” bops, while some of Sara’s greatest hits include lines like “I’m not unfaithful but I’ll stray,” “I swear I tried to leave you at least a hundred times a day,” and – yes – “I don’t want a white wedding.” I admire her level of self-knowledge; I just suuuper don’t want to date someone who approaches relationships the way she does (or the way she seems to in her songs)!

Alvvays – Archie, Marry Me

You’ve expressed explicitly/ Your contempt for matrimony/ You’ve student loans to pay/ And will not risk the alimony

This is a song about a girl trying to convince a boy to marry her. Even though she sounds feminine and sweet, there is something remarkably brash about it. “Hey, hey,” she sings in the chorus, “marry me, Archie.” I admire that level of straightforwardness, and of clarity of desire!

Punch Brothers – Don’t Get Married Without Me

Let’s not fool ourselves/ Taking a break is dragging out a break-up too long/ Help yourself to whatever you like with whomever you like/ But don’t get married without me

The feeling expressed in this song is one I’m sure a lot of us have felt, even if we’re not proud of it: the sense that, even when you’ve broken up with someone, you still have (or want to have) some sense of ownership over them. It’s a shitty monogamy-culture knee-jerk reaction, but what can ya do. I like that this song has a sense of humor about itself; clearly Chris Thile knows how ridiculous it would be to put conditions on the romantic life of someone you’re dumping, but it’s an impulse that comes up nonetheless.

Death Cab For Cutie – Cath…

You said your vows/ And you closed the door/ On so many men/ Who would have loved you more

Ben Gibbard, for some reason, is really good at writing songs about women with romantic regrets. (See also: “Lady Adelaide,” the solo-project track of his that makes me weep for a fictional character.) I find this song relatable even though I’ve never been married; being romantically entangled with “a well-intentioned man” while your “heart is dying fast” is a tough spot to be in, and yet I think a lot of us have experienced some version of that. You want to get out, but you’re worried about what’ll happen if you do.

The Japanese House – Worms

Sharing your house/ Sharing your life/ Sharing your home/ There’s so much pressure not to be alone

I feel this song in the marrow of my bones. It feels like a post-breakup anxiety spiral: “She’s my lullaby and I can’t sleep right,” Amber Bain warbles mournfully, before deep-diving into feelings of large-scale rejection and loneliness. She’s right that our culture is overinvested in pairing people up, and in making single people feel like shit.

Company – Getting Married Today

Listen, everybody/ Look, I don’t know what you’re waiting for/ A wedding? What’s a wedding?/ It’s a prehistoric ritual/ Where everybody promises fidelity forever/ Which is maybe the most horrifying word I’ve ever heard

Just about everything Stephen Sondheim writes is gold, but this is a fave of mine. It’s a nervous breakdown in song form: Amy, a neurotic bride-to-be, has a panic attack the morning of her wedding and enumerates all the reasons she can’t possibly go through with it. I like to think that if I ever get married, I’ll listen to this on the day of, just to bring those last-minute jitters to the surface and exorcize them so I can proceed.

West Side Story – One Hand, One Heart

Make of our hands one hand/ Make of our hearts one heart/ Make of our vows one last vow/ Only death will part us now

On the opposite end of the spectrum, here is a musical theatre song about a wedding gone right. Tony and Maria – based on Romeo and Juliet – sing this beautiful love duet to bind them together. It’s so over-the-top that I think it would actually be too cheesy to be a first-dance song… and yet, I love it.

John Mayer – Home Life

I can tell you this much/ I will marry just once/ And if it doesn’t work out/ Give her half of my stuff/ It’s fine with me/ We said eternity

The J-man has a bit of a reputation as a player, so it’s rare for him to grapple with questions of domesticity and long-term love in his songs, but he does in this one. Mayer has never gotten married as of yet, but has been romantically tied to the likes of Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jennifer Aniston, and Katy Perry. Guess he didn’t click with any of them enough to have “said eternity” with ’em.

What are your favorite songs about weddings/marriage?

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 10 Perfect Sex Songs

Kate Sloan

Welcome back to 12 Days of Girly Juice, my year-end celebration of all things sexy and beloved! Today I’m writing about 10 of the best songs I enjoyed for sensual (and adjacent) purposes this year… (As ever, you can listen to all these songs – and most of my picks from previous years – in my 12 Days of Girly Juice playlist!)

Cruisr – Kidnap Me

So, uh, as you might have intuited from the title of this song, it’s kinda kinky. I don’t know if that was the band’s intention – to write a love song that is at once adorably sweet and ruthlessly perverted – but that is what they have done. “Shackle me up and lock it; I can live in your pocket. When you gonna kidnap me?” the lead singer chirps. “Tie me up to a chair; I could live in your hair. When you gonna kidnap me?”

I’m sure a vanilla person would listen to this song and think it satirical, like montages in horror movies where a killer dismembers somebody to the stylings of ’80s pop. But when I listen to it, I just hear pure, deep, perverse romance.

Say Anything – Wow, I Can Get Sexual Too

Making playlists for each other (or perhaps mix tapes, depending on your era and your level of dedication to the analog arts) is sort of a millennial-romance rite of passage. It’s a way to show your beloved both how you feel about them and how brilliant you are. A double-whammy of confessional hotness.

My Sir and I engaged in this time-honored ritual way back in February. I remember I was running around the Playground Conference, ducking in and out of panels and workshops and podcast recordings, while receiving many a text from this new beau about the epic playlist he was making me. I listened to it on my way home from the conference and cried… a lot. It had Imogen Heap and Feist and the Beach Boys and the Beatles, musical theatre and bubblegum pop, classically millennial love anthems like “Such Great Heights” and “I Really Like You.” It made me feel cradled and appreciated and seen.

One of my faves in the playlist, though, was this Say Anything song, which is about phone sex – something my Sir and I had done a lot of at that point and would continue to do a lot of. “I called her on the phone and she touched herself,” the lead singer whines in the chorus, and maybe it doesn’t sound especially romantic, but to me, it was.

Hippo Campus – Warm Glow

After my first-ever knifeplay scene, Dick asked me what I wanted to listen to during aftercare, and I told him to play some Hippo Campus. They’re my favorite band, so I didn’t even really care which songs we listened to – I know all of them practically by heart. But when he hit shuffle on their discography, this song, “Warm Glow,” was the first one that played, and it was absolutely perfect.

Longer and slower than the Hippo boys’ usual fare, “Warm Glow” has been called “a perennial anthem of positivity,” and that’s part of why I love it as an aftercare song. But I also love that it’s comfortingly repetitive, full of beautifully soothing sounds, and takes its sweet time to build up to an emotional climax. It’s exactly what I need from an aftercare song. (Want more like this? Check out my Aftercare playlist.)

The Japanese House – Saw You in a Dream

This came up in one of my Spotify Discover Weekly playlists and I was immediately hooked. Dream-pop is my jam (thanks, Spotify, you know me all too well) and this song epitomizes my favorite qualities of that genre. It’s loopy and lazy and hauntingly beautiful and sweetly wistful.

I think most of us have had the experience described in this song, of seeing an ex-lover in a dream and feeling shaken up beyond reason by seeing them again, even just in unreality. People can seem so much lovelier in retrospect than they did when they were in your life, and sometimes it’s painful. “You were the sweetest apparition, such a pretty vision,” the Japanese House’s lead singer Amber Bain croons in verse 2. “There was no reason, no explanation: the perfect hallucination.” Sometimes reminiscing about an ex can be too agonizing to bear, but other times it can be a mollifying meander down Memory Lane. Maybe it can even turn you on.

P.S. If you can’t get enough of this song – and I can’t blame you – listen to this a cappella rendition. Ideally while blazed.

Ought – Beautiful Blue Sky

This song is sexy in the way that it’s sexy to fuck someone who is almost robotically dominant: “We do this my way, we do it efficiently, and we do it now.” The driving drums and mechanical guitars forge a rhythm that builds and builds, and then there’s Tim Darcy shouting erratically on top of it all. At times, he seems to be making fun of the whole concept of small talk – “How’s the family? How’s your health been? Fancy seeing you here! Beautiful weather today!” – and the effect is of someone who desperately wants to fuck you, and will do a good job if he does, but doesn’t quite know how to get there from here.

I want my G-spot pounded to the beat of this song. It just feels right.

Ben Rector – Paris

This song is the purest distillation I’ve found of what it feels like to be in New Relationship Energy – or to be in an established relationship that still lapses back into an NRE-esque mode, raw and fresh and sweet. “I haven’t seen her for a month or so,” Ben sings; “Young love feels like finding buried gold.”

I listened to this a lot while falling in love with my Sir. Ben sings in the second verse, “I feel sixteen while we are making love,” and that’s how I felt, too: transported back to a youthful mood where everything was warm and hopeful, and nothing could touch me because I was in love! That’s not always an explicitly sexy feeling – I could write a whole essay about how NRE makes me feel a bit like a haggard zombie running on endorphin fumes – but sometimes it is, and that’s what this song feels like to me. Lust, love, and silly optimism.

John Mayer – Love on the Weekend

My brother showed me this one first. We share a long-standing love of John Mayer – his problematic qualities notwithstanding – and when this song dropped, Max said, “You’ve gotta listen to this one.” Max is usually right about such things, so I did, and damn, the boy knows me: this track is very up my alley.

Like “Paris,” “Love on the Weekend” is definitely an NRE anthem. John sings, “I’ll be dreaming of the next time we can go into another serotonin overflow,” capturing the clinical reality of love’s early days without diminishing its effects. I found this song relatable as my Sir and I fell into a more-or-less monthly routine of one of us visiting the other for a long, luxurious weekend. “It’s a Friday; we finally made it. I can’t believe I get to see your face. You’ve been working, and I’ve been waiting to pick you up and take you from this place.” Oh, John. I’ve loved you for almost two decades and you still manage to sing what my heart is thinking.

Sufjan Stevens – Movement II: Sleeping Invader

This is a standout track on Stevens’ gorgeous instrumental album The BQE, which I’ve loved for years and listened to most memorably through noise-canceling headphones during a sensory deprivation scene with my Sir this year.

Sensory deprivation – like some drugs – can have the effect of amplifying the sensations you can feel. Listening to music while high or sensory-deprived (or both) can cause my brain to organize the input it’s receiving into a narrative that fits with the music I’m hearing. So as my Sir did painful/pleasurable things to my restrained, blindfolded, high little body, I found that those sensations mapped themselves onto the orchestral swells and pulses and pings of The BQE. The album wasn’t just background noise for the scene; to me, it guided the scene, echoed it, co-created it, fused with it.

This felt like a natural continuation of my relationship with this album, which I had once listened to while high and gotten so turned on from the beauty of it that I almost came, untouched. Music is strange like that.

Alina Baraz – Yours

Alina is on this list every year, and not just because it’s tradition at this point: she creates some of the sexiest music I’ve ever heard.

I got a little misty-eyed the first time I heard this song, because in the chorus, Alina sings: “Love me like I’m never gonna leave. Love me like I’m yours.” It reminded me so much of my Sir’s dependable assurances that he has no plans to break up with me, despite my anxious brain always fearing I’m about to lose him. There is something so sexy about simply feeling safe, especially when you go through your day-to-day life never being entirely convinced of your safety. I am skeptical of the whole concept of “lovemaking” – that ooey-gooey brand of hyper-vanilla sex that’s overrepresented in mainstream media and makes my skin crawl – but the arguably romantic act of my Sir murmuring “You’re safe” while he spanks me and steps on me and fucks me is nonetheless as hot and rejuvenating to me as a shot of cinnamon whiskey. It warms me from the inside out. So does this song.

The Esbjörn Svensson Trio – Eighty-Eight Days in My Veins

I can’t believe this song hasn’t made it onto this list before! I’ve loved it for at least ten years, since the days when I’d listen to JazzFM when I couldn’t sleep and take diligent notes on my favorite tracks if the announcers remembered to mention their names (this was pre-Shazam!). I remember hearing the intense, complex lead piano part on this track and feeling transported to another dimension, somewhere icy and angry and full of longing. (My love for this song, and this trio, deepened even further when I found out years later that Esbjörn Svensson had tragically died in a scuba-diving accident at age 44, with decades of beautiful piano-playing still left in him. Rest in power, you Swedish god.)

This song’s been in my aftercare playlist for a while, because it’s so familiar to me as to be soothing – I can sing along with the piano part as it skips erratically all over the musical map (what a nerd). But it’s a sexy song in its own right. One memorable evening this year, my Sir connected my phone to the Bluetooth speakers in the hotel we were staying at so I could pipe my aftercare playlist throughout our room after sex, but by the time we got to this song, we were already fucking again. He came in my throat sometime around the intense, syncopated climax of “Eighty-Eight Days.” It was for that reason that I texted him gleefully to announce when our relationship turned 88 days old. We are nerds and we are in love.

What sexy songs did you love this year?

12 Days of Girly Juice 2017: 10 Perfect Sex Songs

Kate Sloan

Here are 10 songs that gave me sexxxy feelings in 2017… What were your faves this year? (Pro tip: you can listen to all 10 of these, plus all the songs I’ve profiled in previous years of 12 Days of Girly Juice, in my Spotify playlist!)

Shady Elders – The Night Air

I made a note way back in February to include this song in this list; I’ve loved it for that long. It’s a sultry, spacey unfolding of sound. I especially love jerking off to it when I’m stoned off my ass. Marijuana makes the slick beats and smooth vocals coalesce so it feels like someone is playing my vulva like a jazzy old Fender. I can’t listen to this without wanting to roll my hips, close my eyes, and sink into sin.

Betti – Ordinary

In the tradition of Amy Winehouse and Adele, Betti’s hearkening back to the ’60s with this mellow and melodramatic love song. And like many mid-century hits, this one describes a relationship that borders on toxic and abusive, but is painted as quixotically romantic. “We argue til midnight, and make love til daylight,” Betti sings; “Fold your clothes out the dryer; one wrong move, and I’ll light them on fire.” I’ve never been in a relationship this mercurial, and I’d like to keep it that way.

Sometimes I like to imagine this song is about a consensual D/s relationship – or a relationship between two kinksters so closeted, they don’t even realize the capricious game they’re playing is a function of their kinks. It makes me feel a little less conflicted about lyrics like, “We break up just so we can make up… We’re so perfectly fucked up, one step short of crazy.”

Hippo Campus – Boyish (Acoustic)

There’s no way I could omit Hippo Campus from this list. Their music isn’t “sexy,” per se, but it’s most of what I’ve listened to all year. This jazzy acoustic rendition of “Boyish” is the closest thing they have to an anthem of lust – and in classic Hippo Campus fashion, it’s difficult to entirely parse what the song is trying to express. But it sounds sexy, anyway.

There are lyrical elements that remind me of various kink scenarios: “Daddy’s coming home but mama’s looking guilty,” for example, or “Wolf-child’s heavy with the weight of the world, storing all his love in an adolescent girl.” Then there are lines that allude to the tropes of toxic masculinity, like, “I never really knew if I did something wrong; all I ever heard was it wasn’t my fault.” I can never quite decide if I think this song is about a complicated, conflicted man, or a literal werewolf, or the latter as a metaphor for the former. In any case, this version is beautiful. (And I have a hell of a crush on Hippo Campus’ graceful, goofy guitarist, Nathan Stocker. Hnnng.)

Sleeping At Last – Venus

This is a song about finally finding a planet you’ve been sleuthing out in your telescope for ages, but it seems intentionally written like a love song. It’s a metaphor for that moment when you spot someone from across a room and instantly realize they’re going to matter to you. “After a while, I thought I’d never find you; I convinced myself that I would never find you… and suddenly I saw you,” Sleeping At Last mastermind Ryan O’Neal murmurs romantically as the first verse resolves. I’ve listened to this song dozens of times and it gives me chills every. fucking. time because I know that feeling so damn well.

“Venus” reminds me, too, of the electric exploration of a new partner’s body the first time you get them naked: the constellations of freckles and hairs, the sparks of sensation when you discover an erogenous zone, the effervescent present moment that extinguishes all external distractions. You are entirely focused on this beautiful person’s beautiful body – like you’ve got a telescope trained on them and nothing else fucking matters.

Oliver Nelson – Stolen Moments

This track was the theme song for a late-night show I used to listen to on a local jazz radio station when I was in high school. When insomnia loomed over me, and I felt too scared or sad to lie in the dark by my lonesome, I would turn the radio on – and there would always be someone at the station, growling in a rough baritone between meticulously-chosen jazz tracks. This was one of my faves, and still is.

Fucking to jazz feels inherently classy, like you’re doing it under a streetlight’s smoky beams in a gritty 1970s movie. Jazz is also a safer choice than some others on this list (see: Nick Jonas) if you’re wary of sexual partners judging you for your taste. I can’t imagine anyone complaining if you wanted to fuck to this sultry, stunning tune – and if they did, surely you wouldn’t want to fuck them anyway.

DVSN – Sept. 5th

I had a boyfriend this year who told me he wished every band sounded like DVSN. He used to blast their music while we had sex (along with Alina Baraz; see below) so I deeply associate their pulsating R&B jams with deliciously slow-paced kink trysts in a basement apartment that smelled of sandalwood and marijuana.

“I could make it better, if I could have sex with you,” the singer of this track warbles in the chorus. This notion resonates with me. Sometimes sex is like medicine. But medicine that goes down smooth.

Paul Cook & the Chronicles – Ships Pass

Has there ever been a sadder song about one-night stands? I’m no expert, but I don’t think so. This one hits the nail on the head, perfectly capturing that empty feeling that follows an ill-advised hookup with a stranger when what you really want is something more substantial. “It’s cold outside your window, but warm between your thighs,” Paul Cook croons. “We both know what’s happening, but we leave it aside.”

I spent a lot of time this year contemplating what kinds of sex I want to have, and why. I’ve come to the conclusion, again and again, that one-off hookups are not my heart’s desire or my genitals’ jam. For me, they’re like throwing back a few McDonald’s fries when you’re aching for a steak and a heap of roasted veggies. But sometimes you’re starving and there is nothing else available, and that is both dissatisfying and sad. “I will find someone who stays with me all night… Yeah, I will find somebody just right,” Cook promises himself, but it rings hollow. You never know how long it’ll be until the next special person crests over the horizon of your life.

Nick Jonas – Teacher

This year I went to a Body Pride workshop, at the end of which we were encouraged to choose a song that made us feel sexy and dance around doing a naked photoshoot. This is the song I picked. It’s impossibly slick and sexy, overflowing with funk, like a modern-day “Short Skirt, Long Jacket.” If you listen to this while you walk down the street, you will end up strutting like a supermodel. There’s no way around it.

As you might infer from the title of the song, “Teacher” also pings a lot of my subby kinks. With lyrics like “It’s like your mama never taught you how to love – so let me teach you” and “This game we’re playing makes me wanna break the rules,” my boy Nick fuels the fire of my staunch belief that he’s a big ol’ kinkster. You can pry my Daddy Dom Nick Jonas headcanons from my cold, dead, submissive-babygirl hands.

Dirty Projects – Little Bubble

This song does things to my vagina. I don’t know what else to tell ya.

Alina Baraz – Buzzin’

I’ve put a song of Alina’s on this list every year this list has existed. What can I say: girl knows how to make a sexy track. I don’t have much to say about this one except that I can’t listen to it without wanting to make out with someone, grind against a cute person’s thigh while they press against me, and/or party down on a great vibe. Alina nailed it again.

What sexy music did you love this year?