Self-Portrait: Cut Worms

Artwork by Mickey Miles

For our Self-Portrait series, we invite our favorite musicians to create an audio depiction of themselves through songs from the past and present.

As Cut Worms, Max Clarke’s singing and songwriting stylings are situated between ragtime, mid-century rhythm and blues and the incipient era of rock and roll giving his albums an old-world, chronologically displaced, and supremely delightful sensation. His latest self-titled record is a concise nine-track LP condensed to its most pure “pop essentialism” and is an ideal display of what he’s been refining since the beginning of the project. Max takes us through a progression of some of his all-timers spanning nearly a century of recorded music history.

Here’s a playlist of some of my favorite of all time songs—I tried to include selections that span nearly the whole 20th century and beginning of the 21st. A lot could be said about each one but in the interest of time, I’ll say that just about all of them are monumental in their own way and each had a profound effect on me at various moments in my life when I first heard them and they, for me continue to hold just as strong as they ever did.