The mixtape (now called a playlist) is an a unglorified art.
Every playlist is a time capsule! And when you unpack that time capsule you are intimately rekindled with the person you were when you made it, the place where you made it; a projector starts to reel in your mind.
I guess a playlist is a string of visceral reveries, a diary of sorts, a unique soundtrack to your story.
Here are some of my reveries:
"Etudes No. 2"- It's a bleak Boston winter in 2015- "Cornfield Chase"- I'm standing in my first New York apartment. November 2018- I lay on a bare mattress staring at the city lights.
"Year of The Cat" - It's 2003, I'm in my Dad's Volvo convertible crossing the bridge into LBI- my hair blowing in every single direction, "The Entertainer"- My grandpa is sitting in his favorite chair- (he loved The Sting)- "Christmas Island"- Mad Men inspired- I'm on a beach in Australia in December, alone.
It's been scientifically proven that music triggers memories, hence the term: music evoked autobiographic memories (MEAM).
My Grandma Forman passed away from Alzheimers last fall. Towards the end of her life the only thing that evoked her memory, was- music. (Alzheimers studies have shown the power of music in revitalizing memories. If you haven't seen the documentary Alive Inside, I highly recommend it.).
My dads World War III Mixtape that I found rummaging through his car for my sunglasses.
When I unpack my Apocalypse Playlist decades from now, I don't know who or where I'll be.
I just know I'll immediately be rekindled with my quarentemo.
Here are some tracks off of my Apocalypse Playlist:
“I felt myself float up and away, higher and higher into the ether until my body was just an anecdote, a symbol, a portrait hanging in another world.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
The Doors' "The End" off their debut album The Doors
Beware the ides of March: right before New York could bloom, it died.
It's been seven weeks since the great exodus. That day, as I fled Manhattan, headed south for I-95, watching the city skyline melt with every mile, this was the song I listened to.
At the time, this song seemed a little hyperbolic. Little did I know it really was the end of our "elaborate plans" -and-the end of a lot of things.
The track is featured in the opening scene of Frances Coppola's Apocalypse Now.
11 minutes and 43 seconds of pure, presaging doom. It's beautifully tragic.
"All the children are insane waiting for the summer rain"- that line seems pretty fitting right now.
"The End Has No End" by The Strokes off of the album Room on Fire
What seemed like a short blip a few months ago has turned into a slog. Summer is canceled (well sort of). With no vaccine, there is no light at the end of the tunnel!
Is the worst behind us or is it yet to come? Is it the beginning of the end or is it the end of the beginning?
COVID has plagued us with another ill-uncertainty- and it's palpable. One of the biggest lessons we all may learn from this crisis is how to push through the fog and sleet. A lot of the time you have to move forward without all the answers.
The first verse,"the secrets of the government are keeping us dumb" also seems appropriate to say the least. Everyday more muckraking dirty laundry, Trump and his lying, pompous, claptraps.
Arrogant ignorance and blind optimism seems to be the American way during this crisis at least on account of our administration.
"It's All Over Now Baby Blue" off Bob Dylan's Bringing it all Back Home
I'll start by saying there are numerous great covers of this song: my two favorites covered by Van Morrison and The Animals.
If there was ever a great time to listen to Bob Dylan it's right now! To me, Bob Dylan has always been a sort of prophet, a sage, when it comes to spiritual renewal and self actualization.
Dylan wrote this song to signal a departure into a more experimental stage of his career but, to me, the song takes on a different meaning.
To me, "Baby Blue" is a motif for innocence, idealistic youth, making this song an ode to the sort of disenchantment that punctuates our journey into adulthood. The cloak is lifted, our insularity is infiltrated by truth and our disdain for it.
"Forget the dead it will not follow you" is an obvious metaphor for leaving the past behind you. The past is both figuratively and literally dead, and so is any weight it carries into the future. The past should not be lugged but buried, it's grave only revisited in extenuating circumstances.
"Theres something else that calls for you", something way better!!
"Connection" off of the Rolling Stones' Between the Buttons
Between The Buttons is one of the few Stones albums I can listen to cover to cover. It's not at the same caliber of Sticky Fingers or Exile on Main St. but it flows too nicely . "Ruby Tuesday" is the kind of song for a dime and a milkshake. "Loose your dreams and you may loose your mind". What a line!
I think Wes Anderson shares my soft spot for Between the Buttons as conveyed in The Royal Tenenbaums: Do yourself a favor and watch the tent scene: click here to watch
I'll first nod to "Connection". I'm disconnected as hell. I'm out of touch- with people- but also with reality. My inner compass has gone from wound up to broken.
Meet Wilson- my lamp!
Perhaps one of the positives of this pandemic is that it casts a light on the importance of physical human connection, those real face to face conversations that we took for granted (at least I did).
As we walk a tightrope between now and the vaccine we are being taken to digital extremes, and I don't know about you, but it's cutting into my psyche. I've almost normalized being alone- so much that I wonder if when this is all over- will I retreat back into my cave?
No I cant, I wont.
I need to be hopeful! What if a pent up craving for a dose of real intimacy will lead us to a being more connected than ever?
"Telephone Line" off ELO's A New World Record
[Puts on lipstick and lies down]
This is that post-midnight electric dream-pop lullaby for those moments when you lie in your bed and stare at the ceiling. You're half asleep and you start to drift, you enter- the twilight zone.
Right now we are all staring at the ceiling, one foot in our dream worlds, another foot in our past. With fewer distractions it's harder to shake our thoughts and it's easier to drift to somewhere else where we long to be, homesick for another world.
Jeff Lyne has a real fixation on building out a dreamworld as we see in one of his first albums El Dorado. The lure in Electric Light Orchestra's music is in something Oz like. We'll call it Pop Symphony- The Beatles meets The Royal Philharmonic- an infusion of dramatic pizzicato flourishes and Queen styled falsettos.
Much more upbeat than its preceding albums, A New World Record is considered to be ELO's first commercial mainstream album. It's more than fitting that the album cover is a juke box since A New World Record would go one to be ELO's first jukebox hero.
The Album cover is based on the famous Wurlitzer 4008 Jukebox speaker combined with a parody of the General Electric logo.
When I listen to this song I can't help but feel nostalgic for lapsed friendships and fizzled out flames. The irony of this quarantine is that despite isolating us, it has also resurfaced relationships.
I've started to hear from friends I haven't spoken to in years, one of them in over a decade. In turn, I've also reached out to a few people. In a way, this pandemic has shedded our skin. In this moment of clarity, we might have the courage to lay it all out there.
This track also makes me nostalgic for the ancient telephone. In Hollywood the telephone call once had a sumptuous and romantic quality to it- one akin to holding a cigarette. I still keep an old rotary dial in my bedroom- mostly for aesthetic reasons. I'm not a luddite, but i'm not a fan of the winky face tongue either.
To my dismay, telephone chivalry is dead. "U up?"
Pillow Talk 1959
How to Steel A Million 1966
"Road to Nowhere" off of the Talking Heads' Little Creatures
Byrne always does a great job at putting a jovial spin on anxiety and trepidation- some like to call it- "sad-happy".
His catchline "stop making sense"says it all. Byrne never fails to embrace life's absurdity, reminding us that that life is both tragic and hysterical simultaneously.
"I wanted to write a song that presented a resigned, even joyful look at doom, at our deaths and at the apocalypse." said Byrne
If anyone can write a song about death that makes you want to dance, it's David Byrne.
"These Days" off of Nico's Chelsea Girl
"Please don't confront me with my failures: I had not forgotten them".
This is by far my most played and favorite track off of this playlist. Nico has always been one of my favorite artists. I guess I've always seen myself in her fickle yet sad complexion. Take me as I come because "Ill be leaving at the fairest of the seasons".
Wes Anderson can sure pull together a good soundtrack. The unique melancholia in "These Days" is perfectly captured in his film Royal Tenenbaums when Richie is reacquainted with Margot for the first time in over a decade. "Stand up straight and lemme get a look at you".
Its no secret that the same mercurial veneer-the "Nico enigma" if you will, inspired the film's character Margot Tennenbaum.
"Margot was known for her extreme secrecy"- sounds like Nico. Downbeat dark eyeliner- looks like Nico. Ok it's basically Nico. "All my beauty brings me is grief" she famously said.
A prominent member of the Warhol superstars, Nico really was the Manic Pixie Dream girl of 70s punk. A lot of people remember her as a sort of window dressing for The Velvet Underground, but I don't think the band would have commercialized so quickly without her. If Nico was a doll, she was a hypnotic one. Her charisma is what drew in The Velvet Underground's very first fan base. She’s a femme fay-taaaaallll!
Even before the quarantine, this was the soundtrack to dread and drudgery, all those days where I wanted to draw the curtains and hide from the world. And I had too many of those days. Maybe I would have had less of them had I known what was to come. (All my pre pandemic woes are really being given a run for their money)
Now our in between days beg for forgiveness, haunt us with a longing for something we cannot reach, nostalgia for all the good inside all the bad, and regret for which we didn't make happen.
In the words of Fitzgerald, isn't it true that life is defined by opportunities, "even the ones we miss".
"And I wonder if i'll ever see another highway". Starting to miss that long and winding road, it made me dizzy but at least it led somewhere.
"Hate it Here" off of Wilco' Sky Blue Sky
I'm not a huge Wilco fan but I immediately fell in love with this song when I first saw Richard Linklater's Boyhood.
The narrator in this song is going through all the motions to keep him busy, but no matter how busy he is, the thoughts of his lover still haunt him and everything reminds him of her.
To an extent, staying busy can aid our anxieties. I've tried to keep a strict routine to keep myself busy. It might seem over the top, but I block out every part of my day on I-cal (everything is color coordinated- them Virgos know) to give my days some sort of structure and try to fend off the ANTs (Automatic Negative Thoughts).
But my calculated efforts to organize everything has fallen short during this crisis, I can't seem to escape my anxiety.
Somehow my demons follow me everywhere and they are thriving during this lockdown.
Daily Cartoon from The New Yorker
Thats what this song is about. It conveys that no matter how much we distract ourselves and keep ourselves busy: tidying shirts, baking banana bread, Tik Toking, whatever your poison, our restlessness, remains impregnable.
Half the time I think i'm JD Salinger. The other half I'm Forrest, running aimlessly on.
The other day I ran nine miles to the south end of Long Beach Island and back. I got on one of those highs where even after all of those miles, I felt like I could go for ten more.
But ask any runner, you could run to the end of the world but you'll find the world is treadmill. You cant every escape yourself.
To my point, to Wilco's and to Forest's, in the end, "keeping things clean doesn't change anything", it only muffles the siren, and veils the inevitable clutter that is ,well, life .
This pandemic has stirred an inescapable sadness in all of our lives. For now, maybe we should stop resisting, stop spinning, and just let ourselves grieve.
It's not a time to speed up but slow down. Stillness doesn't have to be the enemy.
"Lost My Head There" and "Pretty Pimpin" off Kurt Vile's B'lieve Im Going Down
I love Kurt Vile's vibe-a sort of Kevin Parker enigma infused with a Nick Drake melancholia. Maybe it's the long hair.
"Pretty Pimpin" is the album's winning track and Vile's most popular. It vivifies the idea of Depersonalization Disorder (DP)-when you are disconnected from your body. For people that suffer from this disorder it can literally feel like an out of body experience.
To me, the track is hyperbolic for not recognizing the person you see in the morning. Who hasn't had an identity crisis in front of a bathroom mirror?
As you drag your feet into the bathroom in the morning, just another frowzy and fuzzy reflection staring back at you. Lately I've been having a lot of those: Who the fuck am I? And what day is it?
The Saprano's Season 1, Episode 12 "Isabella"
Neil Young's "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" off of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Ah Dad Rock! This is one of my dad's absolute favorite albums, so of course it's a classic to me. Neil Young has always been my dad's man crush- him and Teddy Roosevelt, I think it's the rugged complexion and jagged personality.
It has become a Fathers Day tradition to blast this album on our deck for all of LBI to hear, that and CCR's Green River.
(Our neighbors have never failed to appreciate our outdoor sound system. Over the years my father has acquired a reputation on the block for playing his music too loud. And his "eclectic" music taste doesn't help. When Pavarotti died it was a whole situation.)
Right now we are going nowhere! It seems like our destiny is on pause, like we are stuck in an elevator!
It's normal to stagnate every once in a while, to tread in one place! But we normally have the capacity to bust our own ruts, to unlock the cages we built ourselves.
This time free will is contained, forcing us to paint within the lines.
It's going to be awhile until we hit the gas pedal again and even when we do it won't be at the full speed we are used to! But somewhere will surely be better than nowhere at all.
Also if you haven't seen Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz go watch it
"Sound & Color" off the Alabama Shakes' Sound & Color
When my grandmother died last fall I couldn't stop listening to this track.
Like David Bowie's "Space Oddity", it really makes me feel like I'm drifting in and out of time-as if I'm levitating.
The track takes on the perspective of an astronaut sent into a cryosleep on a space mission. When he wakes up "500 years have past" and everything is wrong. The world he once bemoaned, he now aches for. He wishes, "[he] never gave it all away".
A beautiful depiction of synesthesia, the music video is both painfully nostalgic and existential. It reminds me of both the famous scene from Interstellar "messages span 23 years" and the scene from The Soloist when Nathaniel (Jamie Fox) listens to Beethoven's symphony and sees flying colors.
Lately I've been drifting in and out of time. I don't know about you but my dreams have been extremely vivid.
Am I in a deep cryosleep?
While that might seem a little hyperbolic, I really do believe that when we return to a new normal it may feel like we are awaking from a deep slumber, a coma.
As with any coma, you wake to find time has defied you.
The good news is, scientists say that cyrosleep is followed by extended periods of awakeness. So maybe, the silver lining is, that we'll wake from this slumber more awake than ever before.
"I want to touch a human being...I want to go back to sleep". Those lines hit different right now. The only time i'm truly awake these days- is in my sleep.
Nas' "Life's A Bitch" off of IIImatic
No explanation needed here but if this lockdown has taught me anything its to quit sulking and carpe that fucking diem because you never know when a pandemic will come and lock you down at home for three-thousand years.
In the words of Tyler Durden "in order to truly live you have to know, not fear, but know- that you are going to die". (I know I know another Fight Club reference, but I had too).
Don't be scared to death, be scared- to life.
Twenty-five years later, IImatic remains one of the most iconic New York albums. It offers the hard boiled, unrelenting, chutzpah every New Yorker needs to grind through the day.
The winning line to me: "I switched my motto; Instead of sayin 'F**k Tomorrow!' That buck that bought a bottle could've struck the lotto!"
Nas, no one could have said it better.
My favorite track off this album is "The World Is Yours," which is a reference to a line in Scarface. It's an essential tune for your morning ammunition playlist. This is your world b**** go get em!
"Im Bored" off of Iggy Pop's New Values
"I'm Chairman of the board"
Look who just flew in from the cuckoos nest?
I found this gem when I was binging episodes of The Grey Whistle Test; it really embodies the crazy in all of us after how many weeks at home? I lost count.
Iggy really was nothing short of wacko. Strung up on drugs, he was in and out of mental hospitals. In 1976 David Bowie dragged Iggy by his feet to Berlin to accompany him in his own famous Schöneberg catharsis.
Thats when Iggy cleaned up his act and came close to commercializing. While he didn't quite top the charts, his legacy helped shape post punk rock influencing bands like The Sex Pistols and The Smiths.
Iggy is undeniably our spirit animal right. Everyones a little mad hatted.
"They say death kills you but death doesn't kill you..boredom and indifference kills you", Iggy would say.
Iggy Pop London 1963
Iggy for Gucci Cruise 2020 Campaign
"I Know it's Over" and "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" off The Smiths' The Queen Is Dead
"I know it's over - still I cling
I don't know where else I can go
Over..."
I don't know where else I can go
Over..."
This album is definitely in my top 50. Depression really is the best music genre.
I Know It's Over is the perfect track for your bedroom blues and self laceration.
"Oh mother I can feel the soil falling over my head". Morrisey's depression has buried him alive!
"Oh mother I can feel the soil falling over my head". Morrisey's depression has buried him alive!
This crisis has taken a lot of people into the depths of despair and as Morrisey writes, for a lot of those people it may feel like the world is collapsing on top of them. With nowhere to go, and no distractions to fill the void, our sadness can feel suffocating.
Morrisey's repetition of "over and over and over" speaks to the monotonous voice inside of our head that drowns out all hope when we feel depressed.
Some historical context: the title The Queen is Dead signals a lack of faith in British authority that paralleled the time. Condemning the British establishment became a common theme throughout Britain's punk rock era. This sort of condemnation couldn't be any more amplified than in the Sex Pistols "God Save The Queen".
Englands legacy, once an imperial shield had, to a lot of young Brits, become in vain, lamenting a lack of inspiration, "England is dreaming" .
As we watch American exceptionalism crumble, our statues of American heroes desecrated and defamed, the pillars of American democracy seem to have fallen.
While we must forge ahead, a lot of us are tired, feel disempowered, and- hopeless. The patriotism that once held us together, united with" liberty and justice for all", is dismantling. Our flag is torn, America is broken.
"Wait" off of M83's Hurry Up We're Dreaming
Im obsessed with this album title. Anyone that knows me knows i'm a sucker for any album with a dream concept like Kid Cudi's Man on the Moon or Electric Light Orchestra's El Dorado.
To me, this particular track is beautiful because it has two meanings: the first is that time is fleeting. You don't live forever, it's now or never. The other meaning, which contradicts the first, is that time isn't real, it's a social construct, an illusion. If you think about it humans are the only species that live with the concept of time. It's not a physical truth.
I realized time's cruel irony when I read Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now last month. His philosophy turned my perspective on time upside down. Tolle made me realize that once you end the delusion of time and surrender to it you can truly be free, that you should see life not as past, present, and future, but instead just a string of presents. "The eternal present is the space in which your life unfolds" he says.
Not letting my mind sink into the future is hard for me, especially sense the present isn't all that stimulating right now. Not to mention, i've always been a planner, its the virgo in me. But like it or not, Ive come to face that you really can't plan anything right now. Each day upends the next.
"Where is my Mind" off The Pixies' Surfa Rosa
"You met me at a very strange time in my life"
The Pixies have an angsty surfer vibe to them, the sort of surf grunge later adopted by bands like Nirvana, Weezer, and Cake.
The song "Where Is My Mind" likely alludes to a scuba diver's head blowing up as he sinks deep into a vast ocean. Black Francis, the lead singer for The Pixies, wrote it after going scuba diving.
I can relate to that sort of seething rage destined to explode. But it's the track's perfect positioning at the end of Fight Club that completely redefined the song for me. (To me it's one of the best score endings in cinematic history). There is no more poignant illustration of loosing your mind than in the last scene of Fight Club.
Busy.org
All of March and April, each day would melt into the next. The line between my anxious inner world and reality would blur into one giant Jason Pollock canvas filled with ragged confusion. I had gone from my time crunched, wound up world, having every corner of my day booked and planned out, to living almost without time as emphasized in M83's "Wait".
I had always rushed through my in between moments, now they were all I knew.
In my altered state of consciousness I had created my own sort of dream bubble, my bended reality and my writing almost serving to protect me from my drab, lifeless life.
Which begs the question: what if our madness is a foil against a larger madness? In Fight Club Tyler Durden creates an alter ego to help him cope with his menial life. He transcends his own reality to help him survive.
All these lamp jokes are actually based on a real coping mechanism- shipwrecked sailors were known to anthropomorphize objects in an attempt to replicate human connection. Thats why Chuck Noland names his volleyball Wilson.
Maybe the power of our imagination can help surmount our prison walls. Maybe our imagination can save us!
"Bad Moon Rising" off of Creedence Clearwater Revival's Green River
"I don't think I was actually saying the world was coming to an end" Fogerty said in an interview. "But the song was a metaphor".
MLK had been assassinated and to CCR it was the beginning of disorder.
This might be one of the greatest and most telling tracks of the Nixon era and it was certainly prophetic as a domino of tragedy would ensue following the songs release in 1969. First, the Manson family cult and the murder of Meredith Hunter at Altamont. Later that year, Bloody Thursday at Peoples Park would famously unfold to the sound of "Bad Moon Rising" on giant boomboxes.
I guess it was only inevitable that the tragic fate of the1970 Kent State Protests would play to the sounds of "Bad Moon Rising"- that bad moon loomed above.
Below is my full playlist:
Every couple of months I'm going to share a playlist with all of you!
