The Age Old Question: A Podcast for Music Fans · Rich Price and Clint Bierman

What Is The Greatest Musical Performance in 50 Years of SNL?

January 20, 2025·44 min·3 clips

SNL hits 50, so Rich Price and Clint Beerman give the music its turn. They treat the show as comedy history, political history, culture machine, and weird live music archive all at once. The question stays simple: what is the greatest musical performance across 50 years of Saturday Night Live? The answer is less simple, which is where the fun is. Billie Eilish gets a serious run. Her Bad Guy performance, with Phineas on guitar and a drummer across the stage, comes up because the staging is such a neat little magic trick. The room spins. The camera stays calm. She seems to walk sideways and upside down, but it still feels like a performance, not just a bit of production showing off. Rich sounds properly knocked out by it, and the conversation even links the effect back to Fred Astaire. Then Rich turns to 1976, with George Harrison and Paul Simon in Studio 8H on November 20th. The hosts toss in quick age jokes and personal time stamps, so the ranking never gets too stiff. Harrison and Simon playing Here Comes the Sun and Homeward Bound is a softer pick than Eilish, but it lands for a different reason. The hook is the harmony. Harrison gets credit as an underrated harmony singer, especially in the way he moves above and below Paul Simon's melody. That is the charm of the episode. They are ranking famous SNL moments, sure, but they are really listening for arrangement, feeling, and why some live performances stick around after the lights go down.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Age Old Question: A Podcast for Music Fans