**What Lena Dunham is listening to:**
I know this is wild self promotion but fuck it: I can’t stop listening to *Girls: Volume 3* , our third soundtrack album. As a teen all I cared about were the soundtracks to *Dawson’s Creek* and *Felicity* , that utilized perfectly emotional indie tunes to underscore heartbreak and virginity loss. While our approach to music on *Girls* is (hopefully) a little more subtle, our music supervisors Manish Raval and Jonathan Leahy have appealed to all my weaknesses and we had an amazing time putting together an album that takes you from grindy grind jam (Dej Loaf and Casey Veggies’ “Tied Up”) to the desperate plea of an abandoned lover (“Giant” by Matrimony). I begged my favorite musician Waxahatchee​ to do a fairly unexpected (but totally perfect) cover of Jessica Simpson’s “With You” and it is what gets me out of bed in the morning. Enjoy!​
**What our Editor-at-Large Doreen St. Félix​ is listening to:**
These days, people are talking about Sister Nancy by name. Kanye West’s released album-in-progress *The Life of Pablo* features a sample of the classic reggae song totally reworked into a different melody. To critics, it registers as a feat of engineering. To me, it feels like going home. “Bam Bam” by Sister Nancy was like wallpaper in my childhood apartment in central Brooklyn. The song was a fixture, perpetually there so as to seem unremarkable. Such is the relationship West Indians tend to have with our music: genres like dancehall and reggae, though of course susceptible to trends in music technology, maintain the integrity of the initial “riddims” (patois for rhythms) that borne them. In this way, the songs all sound related, as if they were family. We can think of “Bam Bam” and the languid vocalist who laid down the track, as a mother.
**What our Assistant Dianca London is listening to:**
I’ve had so many mornings where I’ve woken up feeling anxious and hesitant about everything. When this happens, I battle my bad vibes by blasting the theme song to one of my all-time favorite shows: *Buffy the Vampire Slayer* . Pure shred and pop-punk perfection, the theme, composed by left coast rockers Nerf Herder, has gotten me through some of my darkest moments. When I listen to it, I think about all of the times that Buffy and the Scooby Gang bravely slayed vamps, battled Big Bads, and staved off Sunnydale’s (inevitable) destruction. It’s cheesy to admit it, but listening to the show’s theme song on my headphones makes me feel as invincible and badass as a slayer. It gives me the courage to face the day with the same fierceness that helped Buffy Summers save the world.
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