I wouldn’t say Devyn Rose’s “Who Am I” is my favorite song of 2013—that honor would probably go to “Northern Lights,” a bratty, stompy piece of electropop from the mysterious Swedish outfit Kate Boy, or “Make Room!!!,” a snarling track from arena-emo stalwarts My Chemical Romance—but it’s certainly the track that I’m most infatuated with at the moment. It’s seemingly crafted from a bunch of items that are defined by their utter malleability (watercolors, Silly Putty, post-shower mirror fog), staying stable for only the briefest of moments before swooning, then repeating the cycle anew. I heard about this track, as one does, on the internet, specifically on a thread obsessing over recent R&B releases on the I Love Music message board. A colleague posted it, saying that he wasn’t quite sure how it had appeared in his iTunes library. Which seems appropriate, given that it sounds born out of a dream—specifically, one of those dreams that leaves a smile playing across your lips as you wake up. It’s a hard listen at first, its swirling elements coming together in that odd way that defines songs by the likes of Animal Collective, but its charms eventually took me over.

This issue is Maura Magazine’s 10th, and it looks at Big Things: American pop idolatry, country radio in New York City, the idea of the “perfect” song, and movies that fall in on themselves because of way too much self-referentiality. You can check out a playlist of songs that are name-checked in this issue (including the Devyn Rose track!) over at Spotify.