I’ve been listening to a lot of pop music, which typically coincides with a bit of a spiral. Last time I felt this way, I played nothing but Saves the World (2019) by MUNA for a month and a half. I’m not exactly sure what I’m on, but my brain is telling me that things are Not Going Well.
That being said, let’s focus on the important things here: the playlists have been going absolutely off in the past couple of weeks. I’ve been analyzing the evolution of my curation; I spun a few really old playlists this week that gave me whiplash, but in a good way. A lot of my more recent work has been very genre-streamlined, often limited to a certain type of instrumentation or tempo range. I made this playlist like I was playing a game of telephone, something borrowed from the previous track but with no knowledge of the ones that came before that.
Despite basically never listening to algorithmically generated playlists—I’m sorry, my “Chill Mix” has songs on it that literally make me cry—the algorithm has surely affected the way I curate music. I’m very focused on coherence, and usually try not to go more than ten proverbial steps from the song around which the playlist revolves. A lot of the music I use is from this year, I think because of the cultural focus on and prioritization of new music. I use the word vibe one thousand percent more now than I ever did before, the vibe being the transcendent, ineffable quality, the feel of the music. Not to be the most annoying person on the planet, but what exactly is a vibe? Who gets to be the vibe czar? Aren’t we all just hanging out until we die?
So I went a little off the rails with this one. “Party Trick” would set the tone for a bubblegum moment, but that feel lasts only through the first quarter. The song itself has a darker undertone, the promise of a consequence:
I always end up doing shit like this
Saying I love you for a party trick
Drink your attention 'till it makes me sick
Just for the night, I'll make you mine
I couldn’t say just why I’m so obsessed with this song, but I want to hear it every ten minutes. I really love the way that it drops down in the bridge to almost nothing; pop music so often eschews moments of near-silence in favor of maximalism. I love that it has a bridge at all, in an era where they’re few and far between.
“Shelly” is my new favorite track off of Janky Star (2022), the Grace Ives album I’ve been obsessed with since it came out. The song references Twin Peaks character Shelly Johnson, a troubled and gorgeous diner waitress.
I could get into a whole thing about why it’s so subversive and interesting to hold such a tragic character in the light of such a joyful song, but we can save that for my next newsletter venture, Blockbuster Video, in which I review the approximately two TV shows and four movies I’ve ever watched.
I love the second verse of this song:
She looks for Shelly in the diner
She's got the red lip liner
Oh major-major, niner-niner
I wanna one, two, three, four, five her
Grace Ives has said that this song is about a bartender in New York who looks just like Shelly Johnson, a very literal translation. I love the idea of songwriters finding banal moments and spinning them into threads of a story, but it’s almost more fun to think about Ives weaving this moment into a universe that already exists. It’s rare to hear such blatant pop-culture references in music. She absolutely makes it work.
I’ve mentioned before that my friend Madeline is my personal Jenny Hval evangelist, the benefactor of most good, weird songs in my life. I was over at her house a few weeks ago and she was playing a Jenny Hval record I’m not very familiar with, Apocalypse, girl (2015). “The Battle Is Over” came on and I was immediately enthralled by the danceable, shaker-driven beat, but what really sealed the deal for me was whatever happens in the chords when she says:
You say I'm free now, that battle is over, and feminism's over and socialism's over Yeah, I say I can consume what I want now
Jenny Hval lyrics read as strange poetic speeches, so without rhyme or rhythm that it’s incredible so many of her songs are so often stuck in my head. She reminds me that there’s a world outside of songs that go viral on TikTok, that there are other metrics of success and artistry. I’m inspired by her, despite the fact that I will likely never make art that is anything like hers.
I’m interested to know how you, good people of the playlist-making Internet, curate a listening experience, cultivate a vibe. Comment your artistic process, please and thank you.
I have one playlist. It has 500 songs. They are the songs that I feel most resonated around my life to date. It changes slightly from time to time because there is still new music in my life every day. They are the songs that were the fabric of my life. I don't have to like them. I find a way to weave them into my stories, which are chapters in my autobiography.
Amaya, your mention of a songwriter using fragments they see or hear and weaving them into a story, remind me of when I was setting up for a rose festival stage gig. The rose gardens boarded onto a cemetery and 2 rose tinted haired women were walking in front of me. One pointed at the cemetery and said "I buried my first husband there", turned slightly, "and my second husband over there." My muse hasn't melded it into a song yet. :)
I make ridiculously specific playlists. I think I have something like 250 of them and I’ve only had my Spotify account for a year and a half. I like for everything I’m doing to have music that perfectly fits it. I end up with playlists that have a lot of overlap but to me the moods are perceptively different. For example, my American Gothic playlists and my Cursed Wilderness playlists have a lot of the same songs but the vibe to me is NOT the same. I have a playlist for mountains but also one for the specific mountain I live on. I’m a writer so probably a fifth of my playlists are for fictional characters. I also have no regard for genre, so any given playlist will range from country to grunge, alternative to folk, classic rock to chamber pop. All I care about is mood. And the places and situations I have playlists for might be considered strange. I have one for deserted museums, one for rivers, one for rain, one for terrifying cities. I also have to finish a playlist if I start listening to it. Yeah. I listen to probably too much music.