A playlist for summertime sadness and side-eyeing the rude mechanicals of shifting cosmic currents.

I am still on Spotify, primarily because it’s still the easiest app for making and sharing playlists. I try to compile a new playlist every month or every season, and it doesn’t have to be thematic, just a mood, something that feels like a coherent set of music. I’ve assembled one for August, recycling a title I’ve used before. The name comes from a song on Bob Dylan’s 1967 John Wesley Harding, recorded during that extended upstate furlough after his motorcycle crash. Augustine himself is the patron saint of theologians and philosophers, of printers and brewers. He is invoked against sore eyes. His feast day and the anniversary of his death are in the month of August.

The strands running through this new playlist (Spotify link here) are summertime sadness, portents from beyond, side-eyeing the rude mechanicals of shifting cosmic currents while ultimately succumbing to their collective might. Dylan isn’t actually on it, but Sinéad O’Connor reports for duty twice: once with The The, again at the end sampling Miles Davis and howling down the spiritual oppression of maternal betrayal with “Fire on Babylon.” Bill Fay hangs heavy with the Book of Revelation, while the apocalyptic twee of Love’s “Orange Skies” appears via a cover by São Paulo’s Os Baobás, one of at least two 1960s Brazilian bands to interpret that song — the version by the Galaxies is not streaming.