With 2024 approaching, our minds turn to New Year's resolutions -- asking: who do we want to be in the new year? On this "New Year, New You" episode of Music In Time, we hear tunes from artists who have asked themselves the same question over the years, creating personas and alter-egos to reinvent themselves in the public eye. From George Clinton's Star Child to David Bowie's Aladdin Sane, Jefferson Starship to The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, host Evan McCormick surveys the different reasons that have prompted artists to become someone else, and how those acts of reinvention speak to their historical moments.

1. Mothership Connection (Star Child) - Parliament
2. Pictures From Life's Other Side - Hank Williams (As Luke the Drifter)
3. Drive-In Saturday - David Bowie
4. Livin' Astro - Kool Keith
5. Monkberry Moon Delight - Percy "Thrills" Thrillington (aka Paul McCartney)
6. 7 - Prince and the New Power Generation
7. Be Young You - Jefferson Starship
8. Bad Boy - Buster Poindexter
9. Lay Me Down - Dark Mark and Skeleton Joe
10. Hollaback Girl - Gwen Stefani
11. Ninety-Three 'Til Infinity And Beyonce - André3000

Music does not just exist. It exists in specific times and places and in the sonic world of each listener who engages with it. That’s the basic idea behind "Music in Time," which explores the social and political context in which songs and albums emerge, are listened to, and reflected on over the years. Each broadcast will focus on a single album, detailing the social and political circumstances surrounding its release and moments in time that made certain music resonate anew. How is music shaped by these historical moments, and, in turn, how does it shape the histories that we remember?

By day, Evan McCormick is a historian at Columbia University, where he is part of the Obama Presidency Oral History project, interviewing a range of people — from cabinet members to ordinary folks — about their memories of the Obama years. By night McCormick is a music lover and singer-songwriter, recording under the stage name Egan Caufield. For most of his life, these two worlds remained separate, but after relocating to Catskill, in 2020, he chose to bring history and music together over the airwaves, and Music in Time was born.