Brittany Spanos, Rolling Stone

💭 Thoughts on going hard for Halloween, Labi Siffre, and Charli’s album rollout for Brat.

Brittany Spanos is a Senior Writer at Rolling Stone who covers pop music and fan culture. She’s written cover stories on artists like Harry Styles, Cardi B, Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa, Adele, Chappell Roan and many other of your favorite artists. Along with writing, she co-hosts Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs podcast with Rob Sheffield and teaches a class on Taylor Swift at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. She has a lot of feelings about Fleetwood Mac’s “Silver Springs.”

🎯 Current focus

This fall, I’m really focused on finishing a book proposal. Writing a book has been a dream of mine since I was a kid, and I’ve been really inspired by many close friends of mine who have been selling, writing and releasing their own projects. It’s been difficult to narrow down the type of topic I should write about. I know I want to write a music history book but there are so many eras, artists, micro-genres that excite me; I’ve been pretty overwhelmed by the possibilities. I want to work on something I feel really passionately curious about and I can feel myself getting closer to pinpointing what that will be, finally. 

🤳 An inexplicably, uncurated Reels algorithm 

A big development in my life is I have become really into Instagram Reels. I was a TikTok purist until August when my friends and I started sharing the random videos our uncurated Reels algorithm was sending us, specifically all the Christian and MRA content I was inexplicably being served. I feel like a voyeur observing a totally different world and really dreading the day when Meta catches on to my actual interests. 

🎶 Labi Siffre’s “Bless the Telephone”

I’ve been in a romantic mood lately so I’ve been swooning over a lot of the most tender love songs I encounter. I heard Labi Siffre’s “Bless the Telephone” for the first time in a long while recently and have been listening to it on repeat. It’s so dreamy and sweet and simple, perfectly capturing the warmth and safety of hearing the voice of someone you deeply care about or love. It’s been a perfect summer-into-fall song for me. 

👻 Going hard for Halloween  

Is it lame to still love Halloween as an adult? I don’t think I really enjoyed or appreciated putting together a Halloween costume until I was an adult so I feel like I’m making up for years of not giving a fuck as a kid. Autumn is by and large my favorite season and Halloween feels like the pinnacle of it for me; I spend all of October watching scary movies and transitioning my wardrobe and home to the chillier weather. I’ve tended to go pretty hard for Halloween the last decade of my life; I’ve gotten into a good rhythm of putting together easy but recognizable costumes like the nurse from Blink-182’s Enema of the State album cover or Marie Antoinette. My girlfriends and I have been mulling a fun group costume that we’re hoping to put together this month. I’m okay with hanging on to this probably very childish tradition a little longer. 

👠 Fashion Brand Company and Gia/IRL

I am not a fashion girlie by any means but I care deeply about developing my personal style. Outside of music and entertainment, most of my content consumption is nice clothes and accessories. I’m plus size and didn’t have as many resources for finding style inspiration for people with my body type until I was in my mid-twenties. So the fashion brands I care about most are the ones not only producing extended sizes (specifically past a 2X or 3X) but those who are making fun, inventive, sexy and chic styles for people who have larger bodies. Fashion Brand Company and Gia/IRL are two of my favorites – I feel genuinely excited for new drops from them and have made them staples in my own rotation. 

💬 The power of the group chat

I am a group chat enthusiast. I’m in a lot of them, always have been. They all serve specific purposes though a select few are just big meeting spaces of my extended friend groups to gossip, make plans, talk about nothing. “Addicted” might be a strong word but I am pretty reliant on the endorphin rush of returning to my phone to see a million notifications from any combination of them. Probably because I love attention but mostly because I love, love, love my friends. 

💚 Charli’s album rollout for Brat

Charli XCX really hit the nail on the head with Brat. It has to be the most seamlessly rolled out album I’ve witnessed in a long time and such a perfect elevation of her brand as a pop star. Everything from the press she pursued to the aesthetic she leaned in to perfectly filled a gap in the music and cultural market that made her her own zeitgeist. And as a longtime stan of hers, I really appreciate that none of it sacrificed who she’s always been as an artist and persona. A perfect lesson in avoiding the urge to do a total reinvention with every cycle! It truly feels like Brat is a perfect, raw distillation of everything Charli has been to this point. 

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