It may be the last holiday weekend of the summer, but that doesn’t mean it should end with a whimper. We’ve put together a playlist perfect for your weekend drive or morning commute with a mix of fascinatingconversation and kick-ass music.

• St. Vincent Becomes St. Vincent(February 14, 2014)
  If there’s such a thing as indie rock royalty, St. Vincent is definitely among it.”I’ve always tried to live at that intersection of accessible pop music and lunatic fringe music,” she tells Kurt Andersen in a conversation about her latestalbum.
• Merrill Garbus Is tUnE-yArDs(June 3, 2011)
  Merrill Garbus is the performer and multi-instrumentalist behindtUnE-yArDs— a music project that blends African-inspired rhythms and vocals with electric bass and wild saxophone. She tells Kurt Andersen she found musical inspiration as a student living in Africa. Her mother’s ukulele, purchased at an Army-Navy store, helped her to take the plunge.
• Cassandra Wilson Sings One Last Song for Lady Day(March 19, 2014)
  Cassandra Wilsonis arguably the most important jazz singer of her generation —Timemagazinecalled her“America’s Best Singer.” So it seems only fitting that Wilson’s latestalbum,Coming Forth by Day, is a tribute to the great female jazz and blues singer of last century, Billie Holiday, on the centennial of her birth.
• Inside Jeanine Tesori’s “Fun Home”(April 16, 2015)
  No woman — ever — has composed more Broadway musical scores than Jeanine Tesori. And she didn’t even write her first musical until she was 31 years old. The winner of this year’s Tony for Best Original Score plays a few songs from the musical based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home.
• Live In-Studio: HAIM(September 13, 2012)
  The three sisters of the pop-rock bandHAIMhave the kind of story biopic producers must dream about. Este, Danielle, and Alana Haim grew up in Southern California playing classic rock and ’80s pop covers in a band called Rockinhaim with their father, a retired Israeli soccer player, and mother, a singer who once won a gong onThe Gong Show. The girls kept playing together, dropped the “Rockin-,” anddecided to start writing their own music.