As part of the year-long celebration of Nonesuch Records' 60th anniversary, Mary Halvorson inaugurates the Nonesuch Selects video series, in which artists stop by the Nonesuch office, pick some of their favorite albums from the music library, and share a few words on their choices. Halvorson kicks things off with music by Laurie Anderson, Tyondai Braxton, Jeff Parker, Caroline Shaw & Attacca Quartet, and Kronos Quartet.

Hurray for the Riff Raff (aka Alynda Segarra) shares a lyric video for “Snake Plant (The Past Is Still Alive),” from their 2024 album, The Past Is Still Alive. A memory box presented in the form of a sweeping song, Alynda Segarra revisits formative moments and childhood trips with family, as well as the community, grief, and passion they discovered when they decided to leave it all behind and never stop running. Peeing in the bushes while they wait to hop a freight train, lighting campfires on superfund sites, making moonlit love on an island of trash, shoplifting for food, and playing music with a barrel of freaks – their itinerant adventures serve as a reminder that there are always other ways to live, underlined by an urgent demand: “TEST YOUR DRUGS, REMEMBER NARCAN. There’s a war on the people, what don’t you understand?” Video directed and edited by Jeff Perlman.

Hurray for the Riff Raff (aka Alynda Segarra) shares the video for “Colossus of Roads,” from their 2024 album, The Past Is Still Alive. On the track, written in one tearful sitting during the aftermath of the Club Q shooting, they share a love song for the queer, the vulnerable and the dispossessed. As Segarra calls to idols like poet Eileen Myles and boxcar artist buZ blurr, the song offers a tribute to outsider culture, and the collective fight to survive and thrive despite violence. “I’ve only had this experience a couple of times, where a song falls on me—it’s all there, and I don’t do anything,” Segarra says. “Writing ‘Colossus of Roads’ felt like creating a space where all us outsiders can be safe together. That doesn’t exist, but it exists in our minds, and it exists in this song—this one is sacred to me.” Video directed and edited by Jeff Perlman.

The Staves share a lyric video for “I Don't Say It But I Feel It” from their 2024 album, All Now. “This was the first song we recorded for the album, and we had just written it so there’s a freshness and an immediacy to it for us,” The Staves’ Jessica and Camilla Staveley-Taylor say. “The song is about passing surges of emotions and memories that often don't get expressed or articulated. It’s exploring that state of stillness on the outside but with a flurry of things happening below the surface and how, often, we don’t let on what we’re really feeling most of the time or how much we’re feeling it. Even the question ‘how are you?’ can prove difficult to find the answer to ... The song came from a train ride down to Brighton with friends with the scenery whizzing by—the transient flashes as things come in and out of focus. The song is built around this two-chord pattern that kind of chugs along and motors through, picking out these jolts of feeling or memory that rush by.”

The video for The Black Keys' “Beautiful People (Stay High)” from their 2024 album, Ohio Players, showcases beautiful people across the world, bringing high-energy dancing to match the track’s feel-good sentiment. The single introduces the collaborative nature that sets the band’s new record apart from their previous releases. Written by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney with longtime friends Dan “The Automator” Nakamura and Beck, the track is one of several songs on the album that feature collaborations between the band and various additional friends and colleagues, including Noel Gallagher, Greg Kurstin, and others. Video directed by Chris Saunders.

The video for the title track to Nathalie Joachim's 2024 album, Ki moun ou ye, was shot in Haiti and directed by Gessica Généus. Across the record’s ten intimate, original songs, Joachim ponders its title’s question: “Who are you?” Inspired by the remote Caribbean farmland that her family continues to call home after seven generations, Ki moun ou ye travels deeper into the Haitian heritage introduced on Joachim’s Grammy-nominated 2019 New Amsterdam release, Fanm d’Ayiti. Joachim says of the album and song title, “Creole as a language almost always has a primary, literal meaning of what’s being said plus a secondary layer of understanding, and sometimes even a tertiary level. ‘Ki moun ou ye’ can be very simply asking, ‘Who are you?’ But it also means, ‘Whose people are you?’ And it can also mean, ‘Which person are you.’” She continues, “For me, it led to, ‘Who am I actually?’ Not just on a performative level, but also as a Black person in spaces where I constantly have to code-switch. It’s a deep question. It isn’t casual.”

The music video for the title track to The Staves' 2024 album, All Now, is directed by James Arden and inspired by the influential British music television program Old Grey Whistle Test. “It’s a stream of consciousness about frustration and feeling overwhelmed with modernity,” the duo—Jessica and Camilla Staveley-Taylor—says of the title track. “Kind of a rejection of the performative way we have to express ourselves now in order for it to be deemed valid. We were in love with the old footage of singer songwriters performing in shows like the Old Grey Whistle Test, and the way the audience hung on the singer’s every word. We wanted to play with the idea of ‘All Now’ being an ideology and a message. Something that came from artists and creatives, but is then hijacked and commodified by corporate creeps, preaching the message to gain power.”

Hurray for the Riff Raff (aka Alynda Segarra) shares the music video for “Alibi,” from their 2024 album, The Past Is Still Alive. “The Past Is Still Alive is an album grappling with time, memory, love and loss, recorded in Durham, NC, a month after losing my father,” Segarra says. “‘Alibi’ is a plea, a last ditch effort to get through to someone you already know you’re gonna lose. It’s a song to myself, to my Father, almost fooling myself because I know what’s done is done. But it feels good to beg. A reckoning with time and memory. The song is exhausted with loving someone so much it hurts. Addiction separates us. With memories of the Lower East Side in the early 2000s of my childhood, mixed with imagery of the endless West that calls to artists and wanderers.” The video is directed, produced, and edited by Eric Stafford, with creative direction by Segarra, and additional footage by Kat Sotelo.

Natalie Merchant shares the video for “Sister Tilly,” from her 2023 album, Keep Your Courage. The track is dedicated to Joan Didion and pays homage to the generation of women who influenced Merchant in the 1960s and ’70s when she was growing up and the video, directed by Matthew Shattuck, features archival footage from the era. “This song holds a very dear place on the album,” says Merchant. “It celebrates the life of a woman I created to embody traits of several beloved female friends of mine who have passed away. These were all beloved mother, auntie, and sister figures that I owe so much for all the nurturing love and care they gave me throughout my life. You may recognize Tilly qualities in a cherished adopted or blood relative or friend who was part of that generation of women who came of age during the mid 1960s-mid 1970s. As happens with songs, ‘Sister Tilly’ has already grown to signify a generation of women–more than just one woman. When I have performed it live over the past six months, I can feel the song’s resonance with the audience. I can tell that I’m not the only one who feels an urgency to give these women their due respect. We owe them so much more.”

Rhiannon Giddens collaborates with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project on a fundraising initiative and a powerful music video for her song “Another Wasted Life,” from her 2023 album, You're the One. The video, released on the tenth annual Wrongful Conviction Day, features twenty-two wrongfully convicted people, clients of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project. It aims to raise awareness for the stories and voices of those who have experienced the injustices of the criminal legal system. Giddens filmed the video, directed by Daniel Madoff, in Philadelphia with the twenty-two formerly incarcerated people, who collectively spent more than 500 years in prison for crimes they did not commit. It features their names and the number of years that each spent wrongly incarcerated. The video was directed by Daniel Madoff. Inspired by the tragic story of Kalief Browder, a young man wrongfully incarcerated at New York City’s Rikers Island for three years, where he was subjected to nearly two years of solitary confinement, Giddens wrote “Another Wasted Life” as a reminder of the human toll exacted by wrongful convictions and the importance of prison reform.