Kamala Harris is a big music fan.
The Democratic presidential candidate took part in the music game Track Star, in which she had to guess a song based on a few seconds of the instrumental track and won money for each correct answer. Harris effortlessly recognized a song by Stevie Wonder, whom she called “one of the greatest musicians of all time. (…) He’s a lyricist, a poet, he’s very committed to social justice issues and he’s actually a friend.”
Harris also admitted that due to her busy schedule recently, which is gearing up for the presidential election, she “probably hasn’t listened to this much music in a long time.” She continued, “My parents both loved music. It was part of my childhood. When we went to sleep, music was playing all the time.”
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She concluded by noting that everyone should know Roy Ayers Ubiquity’s 1976 hit “Everybody Loves the Sunshine.” She admitted, “It’s one of my favorite songs.”
Harris recently sat down with her vice president, Tim Walz, for an in-depth conversation about the music that has shaped her life. For Walz, it began with Bruce Springsteen’s 1980 album The riverwhich he described as a “transformative piece of music” for him. He also shared his love for Bob Seger. “My first car was in the summer of 1980 and I had saved up. I bought an orange 1973 Chevy Camaro,” he recalled. “It had an eight-track player in it. The previous owner left Bob Seger’s Night movements in there. I listened to it and it’s kind of the soundtrack of my life. (…) The really great thing about it is that I have a 1979 International, that’s my car, and it has an eight-track player. I still have the eight-track player to this day.”
Harris added that while Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis and John Coltrane were the main characters in her childhood home, one of her “personal favorite musicians” is Minnesota’s Prince. “My husband, Doug, and I – I’m more of a hip-hop fan and he’s more of a Depeche Mode fan,” she said. “But in the Venn diagram of things, Prince and I love the same thing. All you can talk about is how Prince was with that guitar, man. I know almost every one of those songs by heart.”
