Playlist Help: Psychedelic Soul

Helping readers craft the perfect playlist one song at a time

If you enjoy this newsletter, consider ordering a copy of my debut book, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. It’s a data-driven history of popular music covering 1958 to 2025. You can read an excerpt here.

Today’s newsletter is a new edition of Playlist Help, our monthly series where I construct a playlist for a reader that follows a very specific set of rules. This month’s playlist request came from Jordan:

I am looking for more songs like "Ball of Confusion" by The Temptations or "Get Up And Get Down" by The Dramatics. They are both very polished soul records, but have a grittier, rockier quality than most other music I've heard from Motown or Stax.

I think I can help with this, Jordan. If you’re reading this and you need playlist help, click the button below and tell me about it. To clarify, I am not looking for help with this user’s request. I am looking to help you with your curation needs (e.g., “I need more songs like ‘Islands in the Stream’ by Kenny Rogers). If your request is selected, you’ll get free access to the premium tier of this newsletter for a month.

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Genre is weird. You could have two artists making very similar music that are classed as different genres because of where the artist is from or what they look like. In my forthcoming book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves, I discuss this extensively. Genre classifications are heavily tied to race and gender. Psychedelic soul is a good example of this.

“Ball of Confusion” by The Temptations — and other songs often classed as psychedelic soul — are often deeply influenced by rock music, yet you will never hear them on classic rock stations. The reason for this is that the artists that made this music are usually Black, and Black artists — especially after 1970 — are typically excluded from the classic rock club.

I think it’s important to remember that when listening to this music. While many of the artists that I included on this playlist are Black, I tried to also include artists from different racial backgrounds to show how the sound did cross barriers.

I also tapped my friend

Brad Kyle

to help with this playlist. Kyle runs the wonderful newsletter Front Row & Backstage, and is one of the most knowledgeable people I’ve ever met when talking about music of the 1960s and 1970s. Here’s a great quote from Kyle when I asked him to suggest some music for this playlist:

Early- to mid-1970s had Mother’s Finest, a mixed-race funk/rock band (I guess not unlike Sly & the Family Stone) ... I think Mother’s Finest was on RCA around 1973, and (in)famously, one of the 4 acts who released their Epic/CBS debut the last week of August 1976 … In the same week, they released the Boston debut album! Mother’s Finest, Herb Pedersen, and Jim Peterik's albums. Radio jumped all over the Boston, and never gave a listen to the other three!

Now, that’s some deep knowledge. Anyway, the playlist is below. I made it on Spotify, but if you use a different service, I recommend using Soundiiz to transfer it over.