The Playlist Game

We’re trying (thinking of?) doing more posts, and more personal ones, on random things. Once a month, or so, we’ll still do the usual 3x3. But why not other stuff too? No rules. I think some of these will be less considered but hopefully, they’ve got music for you. — JR

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I wanted to think about a habit I’ve got. I find myself, compulsively, making playlists with stupid themes. Stuff like:

• Songs that mention the brand Gore-Tex.

• Songs with the same title as Neil Young tracks but none of them are covers.

• Songs where people mention being above 30 years old. (It’s got one song! A long project ahead.)

• Songs that mention Covid explicitly (Jack and I did this).

• Songs with “run” in the title.

• Songs where Mick Jagger says the ethnicity of a woman he has sex with.

• Songs where the title is someone’s name.

• Songs about recessions (2 songs, lame effort).

• Songs with the title “welcome.”

In each, the idea is not a coherent sound. (In fact: I am unsure—at least for some of them—if I ever want someone to listen to them all the way through.) And so what am I doing?

I was thinking about this biking around this week. In New York, it has felt like England. Rain. Between 30 to 40 degrees. Awful. Too often, I bike through it. Those of us who do this know the ritual. It’s stupid. You show up wet. Your hands freeze. You slowly plod and stop—if your brakes work at all. You come home and have to clean your bike to avoid rust. Everything slows. It is not the calm, ease of cold. Just annoyance and mud.

While biking, I miss North Carolina, Arkansas, Mississippi—false idols. I find myself listening to country music more than usual, fantasizing and fetishizing. I slowly crawl up Throop, looking back continually at bright headlights. If I die like this, I think, that’d be funny. I am listening to a song with a fiddle and staring down a Honda.

For about a month, I have especially latched onto Tyler Childers. (Always I find a way back.) Of late, I play “Shake the Frost” most. I head to work or the bar or a friend’s and I sometimes put it on a single song repeat; repetition until it becomes mush.

As I did this a few days ago, I thought of another dumb playlist: Songs about falling in love in a car.

Childers sings:

Well, I used to ride a Mustang

And I’d run that thing on high hopes

‘Till they raised the price of dreams so high I couldn’t pay

—

So I let that car just sit there

When I should’ve took you driving

With the windows down while the music played

—

So if it’d make you stay

I wouldn’t act so angry all the time

I wouldn’t keep it all inside

And I’d let you know how much I loved you everyday

I cannot imagine anything more romantic than windows down in a car and you’re in love.

The first two relationships of my life felt like that. In college, I dated someone I met as a teacher in Mississippi. (More accurate I suppose to say I got to know her deeply then.) Summer mornings we’d drive to a rural school, looking at the flat landscape of farmland—alluvial plains. I pulled the window down and I played music too loud. Whipping wind. The same occurred with my girlfriend in high school in Greensboro. I vaguely recall driving in the middle of the night on highways with her. She told me later she didn’t much like the music I played—Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Doc Watson, Uncle Tupelo. But when I showed her what I was listening to she liked me. She said it always looked like I was afraid she wouldn’t like the song, and in turn that she wouldn’t like me—my identity so bound up in listening to a few bands—and so I got tender trying to explain myself. (Oh, bud, young men!)

I thought of that when I pulled to the side of the wet road to make the “car love” playlist and add this song to it. Maybe it was cold, and the rain caught me, and I am overthinking it, but the only thing that popped to mind is that I was embarrassed that this is basically how I process art. The best I could do with a little tidal wave inside me imagining first love was a joke playlist? Are others able to take themselves seriously? I dream of it. How anyone writes a novel is beyond me. I basically struggle when anything isn’t (at least partially) a joke. A genetic trait. I’ve never seen a stressful situation in which my father did not try to do slapstick. (Family lore: My Dad was so nervous during my brother’s birth he compulsively joked with the nurse setting my poor Mom’s IV. He is funny. That makes it worse. The nurse shakes laughing. She can’t set the needle. There is now blood everywhere. Mom is about to end a life before she births one. Dad’s getting even more nervous and the jokes fly, faster and faster. Eventually, we all got out alive. I am not sure how. I think one year we made my Mom a medal or something for enduring the jokes. If we didn’t, we should have.)

When I was a kid, the issue felt to be money with music. I wanted more. I wanted every record in the store. In high school, CDs scattered in the back of the Totoya Camry I drove. And I couldn’t access the emotions I wanted to buy. Now, it feels like I have all this music, all these thoughts—stupid, good, bad; often it’s just “I like it”—and I don’t know how to communicate an online existence in which I am constantly blasted with new information that does make me feel things. Where to go with these useless emotions?

Making the goofy playlists is probably my subterfuge of that feeling. I’d like to just once organize the details of my day into a “joke” that explains how I feel. These playlists are little stabs. I have no desire to be an artist. Or to live past my times. Or to make something for history. But I would like to be understood.

Making a playlist is a bit like writing in the margins of a novel you love. I am connecting this with this and that. It is a way of engaging when so much tells us to sit back like all of life’s an elevator. Muzak. In the end: I want to be a reader and listener who hears something and can communicate it to others. That sounds simple. It’s impossible.

All of this doesn’t have to be a big deal. The playlists can genuinely be the stupid things like Best Songs Listing Locations. But, yes, I do hope a list of songs about being in love in a car explains how I feel when I look in someone’s eyes. And it doesn’t sound anything like it so far.