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September 29, 2026 
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My favorite phone songs
10 songs, 35 min 49 sec
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| Michael Stipe of R.E.M. Irina Rozovsky for The New York Times |
Dear listeners,
Today’s playlist is all about one of popular music’s most enduring muses: The telephone.
I’ve been thinking about phones a lot this past week, since I saw Phoebe Bridgers play a “phone-free” arena show on Thursday night and then wrote an essay considering the arguments for and against banning cellphones at concerts. Although I’m usually wary of mandates, in this case it was a relief to be liberated from phones — my own and the other concertgoers’ — for a few fleeting hours. And in the idle moments in lines or between sets when I would have distracted myself by texting or mindlessly scrolling, I found myself thinking about much more interesting things — like the long evolution of the telephone’s presence in pop music.
I find phone songs particularly fascinating because they are usually a reflection of the technology of their age. You’ll hear that on this playlist: Chuck Berry pleading with a long-distance operator in 1959; the Kinks dealing with an invasion of privacy on a shared service line in 1966; Lady Gaga’s cellphone connection breaking up in 2010. Still, the underlying tension that drives most phone songs is timeless — the desire to connect with another person, and the many possible obstacles that can stand in the way.
In that spirit, may this playlist inspire you to give someone in your life a good, old-fashioned phone call. Here’s hoping you don’t get a busy signal.
It’s good to hear your voice, you know it’s been so long,
Lindsay
1. Blondie: “Hanging on the Telephone”
The driving rocker that kicks off Blondie’s 1978 breakout album “Parallel Lines” is actually a cover of a song by a little-known West Coast power-pop band called the Nerves. Blondie’s version kicks up both the tempo and the desperation of the original, effectively dramatizing the frustration and the romance of waiting for a fateful call.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
2. Tommy Tutone: “867-5309/Jenny”
Tommy Tutone — which it might surprise you to learn is a band, not a guy! — inspired countless prank calls with this 1981 hit, catchy enough that an entire generation still knows Jenny’s number by heart. Despite the band members’ coy suggestions that the song was inspired by a real woman, in 2004 the song’s co-writer Alex Call admitted that it was all fiction. “It makes a better story but it’s not true,” he said of the rumors that there was a real Jenny. “That sounds a lot better than ‘I made it up under a plum tree in my backyard.’”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
3. Erykah Badu: “Cel U Lar Device”
In 2015, Erykah Badu released “But You Caint Use My Phone,” a phone-themed mixtape titled after a famous line from her 1997 hit “Tyrone.” One of my favorite tracks is this reinterpretation of Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” especially because of the hilarious voice mail interlude in the middle.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
4. The Kinks: “Party Line”
This jangly opening tune from the Kinks’ 1966 album “Face to Face” finds narrative possibility in the now-antiquated technology of the party line, a communal telephone number shared by a group of neighbors. “Please tell me when I can have my privacy,” sings the guitarist Dave Davies, in a rare lead vocal appearance. “I’d like to meet the girl who’s always talking when I’m speaking on my party line.”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
5. Lady Gaga featuring Beyoncé: “Telephone”
In 2009, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé teamed up for this extravagantly maximalist synth-pop number — and later its epic music video, which plays out like a Pop Art 21st-century update of “Thelma & Louise.” It is also the pair’s second telephonic collaboration of 2009, following Gaga’s guest appearance on the extended remix of Beyoncé’s single “Video Phone.”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
6. R.E.M.: “Star 69”
“I know you called / I know you hung up my line,” Michael Stipe sings on this bouncy track from R.E.M.’s 1994 album “Monster,” named for the U.S. telephonic code to call back the last landline number that dialed yours. Potential prank callers, beware!
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
7. Chuck Berry: “Memphis, Tennessee”
Chuck Berry wrote and played every instrument on this B-side of his 1959 single “Back in the U.S.A.” Addressed to a long-distance operator on the other end of the line, “Memphis, Tennessee” is a tale of missed connections with a clever twist at its conclusion, when it’s revealed that the girl the narrator is trying to get in touch with is not, as it may have been assumed, his paramour, but rather his 6-year-old daughter.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
8. Electric Light Orchestra: “Telephone Line”
Jeff Lynne has a one-sided conversation with someone who won’t pick up that telephone on this beautifully arranged pop-rock symphony from E.L.O.’s 1976 LP “A New World Record.” To capture the American ringtone — different from the British one — that runs throughout the song, the English band placed an overseas call to a random number and let it ring for a long while. “On the Moog,” Lynne recalled, “we recreated the sound exactly by tuning the oscillators to the same notes as the ringing of the phone.”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
9. Glen Campbell: “Wichita Lineman”
The songwriter Jimmy Webb was once driving through a flat, desolate stretch of Oklahoma highway when he whizzed by a lone lineman atop a pole, repairing telephone wires in the middle of nowhere. “He was gone very quickly,” Webb once recalled in an interview, “and I had another 25 miles of solitude to meditate on this apparition. It was a splendidly vivid, cinematic image that I lifted out of my deep memory while I was writing this song.” The country crooner Glen Campbell said he cried the first time he heard Webb’s demo, and his emotional connection to the song helped turn it into a Top 10 hit in 1968. Bob Dylan once referred to this poetic meditation on an Everyman’s longing as “the greatest song ever written” — and that means something, coming from Bob Dylan!
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
10. Jenny Lewis: “On the Line”
Let’s wind this conversation down with the title track of the singer-songwriter Jenny Lewis’s great 2019 solo album, “On the Line,” a lush, bittersweet tune that finds Lewis calling up a former flame one last time: “Listen to my heart beating on the line,” she sings, her voice laden with nostalgic melancholy. We know that this relationship really is over, though, because the song ends with the most heartbreaking of all phone sounds: a dial tone.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
The Amplifier Playlist
“My Favorite Phone Songs” track list
Track 1: Blondie, “Hanging on the Telephone”
Track 2: Tommy Tutone, “867-5309/Jenny”
Track 3: Erykah Badu, “Cel U Lar Device”
Track 4: The Kinks, “Party Line”
Track 5: Lady Gaga featuring Beyoncé, “Telephone”
Track 6: R.E.M., “Star 69”
Track 7: Chuck Berry, “Memphis, Tennessee”
Track 8: Electric Light Orchestra, “Telephone Line”
Track 9: Glen Campbell, “Wichita Lineman”
Track 10: Jenny Lewis, “On the Line”
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