Xfinite Radio Artist Spotlight

There are songs you play and then there are songs that let a whole room let off steam, and Alanis Morissette gave us one of the biggest steam valves the nineties ever had. When "You Oughta Know" hit in the summer of '95, it wasn't polished pop — it was raw, loud, and honest in a way nobody on the radio was doing at the time. You could feel the whole room sit up the first time that chorus came crashing in. Her peak came fast and it came huge. Jagged Little Pill wasn't just a hit album, it was a phenomenon — 33 million copies, five Grammys, and songs like "Ironic," "Hand in My Pocket," and "You Learn" that everybody from the office to the carpool line knew by heart. Alanis wrote like she was reading your diary back to you, and that's why she mattered. She turned frustration and heartbreak into something you could sing at the top of your lungs with your friends, and suddenly you didn't feel so alone in it. Here's the booth ...

There are singers, and then there is Whitney Houston. The first time I heard that voice come through a real sound system, I understood the difference in about four seconds. It wasn't just powerful — it was clean, controlled, and completely fearless. When Whitney sang, she didn't chase the note. The note came to her. Her peak run in the eighties reads like somebody made it up. "Saving All My Love for You," "How Will I Know," "Greatest Love of All," "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" — seven straight number-one singles in a row, a streak nobody had pulled off before. She could take a ballad and make a whole room hold its breath, then turn around and make that same room dance like nobody was watching. And "I Will Always Love You" came later and proved what we already knew: there has never been another voice quite like hers. Here's the booth angle: every DJ has a record they save for the moment a night needs rescuing, and for me, ...

If you spent any time behind a DJ booth in the seventies — or any time at a party since — you know the Eagles aren't just a band. They're a mood. Put on "Take It Easy" and the whole room loosens up a notch. Put on "Hotel California" and everybody, from the teenagers to the grandparents, suddenly knows every single word. The Eagles came out of the California country-rock scene and turned it into something bigger than anybody expected. "Desperado," "Lyin' Eyes," "One of These Nights," "Life in the Fast Lane" — that's a run of songs that doesn't sound like a greatest-hits album, it sounds like a whole era. And then there's "Hotel California," one of those rare songs that never gets old no matter how many times you hear it, because every listen finds something new in it: that guitar work, that mystery, that feeling of a place you can check into but never quite leave. Here's the booth angle: I ...