BUYFI SELECTS_011 (02/20/26)

This week is about songwriting via selections.

Three songs I love deeply, and some of the things I've stolen from them.

Recently, I've been talking about songwriting on youtube. As I develop the idea for my next video, I wanted to share the concept here first, because it comes with songs attached.

Keep scrolling for 3 very different songs, from 3 very different decades (80's, 00's, 20's), or listen to these tracks and loads more- BUYFI SELECTS ON SPOTIFY. Smash that "save" button on the playlist, because I'm updating this badboy all the time.

And, while you're over there, listen to "FITP (Feelings in the paint)", my latest single featuring Chai Tulani.

ICYMI:

WATCH: 3 songwriting tips that actually changed how I write.

LISTEN & FOLLOW: Does anybody still use Soundcloud?

Thanks for stepping outside your algo, thanks for being here. Anyway,

BUYFI SELECTS_011

FEBRUARY 20 2026 SELECTIONS

1.

Music written and produced by Imogen Heap has been stuck in my head for 20 years.

Imogen Heap's music keeps going viral every few years. A new generation discovers an old track, someone samples something, a key moment of a song underscores the exact right moment of a film or tv show. As proof, please allow me to posit this fun fact: her song "Headlock" just hit the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time in 2025, twenty years after it was released, because of a video game and a social media app. Her songs have this way of resurfacing, finding new audiences through different technologies, different platforms. Her work has yet to find a medium through which it fails to connect. Although her endurance certainly has something to do with her singularly captivating voice, personally, I've always been equally compelled by her simple yet incisive lyricism.

Lines like this one from "Let Go": "Hand me that remote, can't you see that all this stuff's a sideshow."

Hand me that remote.

That's the trick. You start with something mundane. Something tactile. Something everyone's felt, words we've all said aloud. She anchors us in domestic space. and instantly creates a cast of 2 characters. And then, she goes wide. "All this stuff's a sideshow." I've loved this lyric ever since I ripped an .mp3 of "Let Go" off the seminal Garden State soundtrack and onto my 3rd generation ipod in 2004, but there's one thing I can say for sure after the subsequent passing of 21 years: although a lyric like "All this stuff's a sideshow" hits harder at 34 than at 13, it hit the whole time.

"Let Go" is by Frou Frou, Heap's duo with Guy Sigsworth in the early 2000s- one album, Details, before she went solo and became the Imogen Heap we know now, but I think it offers us one of the best examples of a lyrical technique she has used throughout her career.

Mundane to profound. It works because you know it, you trust it. The fortune cookie wisdom lands because it started with something tactile.

One last fun fact before the paywall: did you know Zach Braff won a grammy?

LISTEN TO "LET GO" BY FROU FROU ON BUYFI SELECTS:

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2.

Paul Westerberg is one of my songwriting heroes. The Replacements were drunk and chaotic, a loud, distorted mess at their most brilliant, but they could get quiet. Specifically, Westerberg could get quiet in his Minneapolis basement, late at night. Armed with a drum machine and a 4-track tape recorder, shielded by drink, Westerberg could access the tenderness and creativity to make "Within Your Reach."

It's fragile. It has a synth lead. It's the opposite of everything The Replacements were supposed to be.

According to Bob Mehr's Trouble Boys, the rest of the band hated this song. Chris Mars was devastated that Westerberg used a drum machine instead of letting him rip. But the song became one of the most emotionally resonant things The Replacements ever did. And, since I mentioned Braff et. Garden State, it would be a crime to omit Cusack- "Within Your Reach" is essentially John Cusack in song form, immortalized eternally alongside Peter Gabriel and Ione Skye (bonus rec: rewatch Say Anything).