I made this playlist in a cool twenty minutes, after a friend sent me “Walk On” from Neil Young’s On the Beach (1974). I had forgotten that this song existed, and upon listening was immediately dropped into summer 2020, when I first heard it. The pandemic was in full swing, but I was in a period of relative comfort; I found joy in cooking, volunteering at the food bank, and cycling. I remember listening to “Walk On” while flying along the shoreline paths where I first started biking. It felt defiant, exuberant in a time the world looked to drag me down. Some days, it succeeded, but not while I was listening to Neil Young.
The second track is perhaps my favorite song of all time, or at least my favorite live performance: “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) - Live” by Talking Heads. I contend that the live version is far superior to the studio one, and I will die on the hill that Stop Making Sense (1984) is the best concert film, if not one of the best movies, ever made. David Byrne is a visionary—he worked closely with director Jonathan Demme—incorporating costumes and lighting into the performance, and cutting the gratuitous shots of the audience previously ubiquitous to concert films. Byrne’s physicality, rendered outsized by his iconic doublewide gray suit, carries the film as both a performative and narrative element. The kinetic energy of this band is incredible, and the live recording is imbued with that fervor.
I love Wilco, and anything Wilco-adjacent: Uncle Tupleo, Jeff Tweedy, etc. Schmilco (2016) is the band’s tenth studio record, is a return to the band’s folk roots, especially in my favorite tracks, “Normal American Kids” and “Someone to Lose.” The meandering, wistful lyrics, feel nostalgic; “Nope” is one of the most contemporary songs on this playlist, but it fits right in.
“Cusco” by Allie Crow Buckley is from an EP that I’ve been truly obsessed with recently, So Romantic (2019). “Captive” and “As I Walk Into the Sea” were my top songs of December and January, respectively (thanks, StatsforSpotify). As the final track on this playlist, “Cusco” ties the more electronic sounds on “Skyless Moon” and “Sound and Vision” to the guitar-folk songs like “Kodachrome” and “Continental Breakfast.” Her lyrics recall both modern hyper-specificity and the traditional themes of artists like Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake. The second verse of Cusco:
I've been inhaling second-hand smoke in a city far from yours
I've been loving a man with a freckle
Under his lip and Carl Jung up on his wall
What he didn't know was
I'd be yours in time
You've been whispering to me through the ether
She has a record out this month which I’m anticipating will be one of my favorites of this year.
I’ll close with my favorite Talking Heads lyric:
Out of all those kinds of people
You’ve got a face with a view
I'm just an animal looking for a home
Share the same space for a minute or two