By Lindsay Zoladz

Dear Listeners,

The first time the Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg met one of his musical heroes, Alex Chilton of the underappreciated power-pop band Big Star, Westerberg suffered a sudden lapse in memory: “I’m in love with that one song of yours — what’s that song?” The title Westerberg was grasping for, according to Bob Mehr’s Replacements biography “Trouble Boys,” was “Watch the Sunrise.” But this would turn out to be a fruitful forgetting, since the incident gave Westerberg the lyrical hook to a song he’d later write about Chilton: “I’m in love — what’s that song?”

“Alex Chilton,” that sky-scraping rock anthem that appeared on the Replacements’ 1987 album “Pleased to Meet Me,” is among the greatest songs one musician has ever written in tribute to another. But that’s hardly an anomaly: Pop music history is full of artists paying tribute to predecessors or contemporaries they admire. Consider Bob Dylan’s early “Song for Woody” — or David Bowie’s “Song for Bob Dylan.”

Today’s playlist compiles 11 such tracks, from artists including Van Morrison, Florence + the Machine and Stevie Wonder. Because this playlist could be incredibly long if I didn’t limit my parameters a bit, I decided to stick with songs that directly consider another artist’s music and explicitly mention the other artist by name in their titles. That means that Leonard Cohen and the Grateful Dead’s Janis Joplin homages (“Chelsea Hotel No. 2” and “Bird Song”) were both ineligible, as was Charli XCX’s more recent but no less heartfelt ode to Sophie (“So I”). Don’t worry — this still left me with plenty to choose from.

I see many of these songs as a kind of musical correspondence across the history of pop music, providing unexpected connections and making visible certain lineages. Let me know if I missed your favorite.

Never travel far without a little Big Star,

Lindsay

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