every daylist a little death

Burbank. [Image Credit: Los Angeles Times]

Despite my strong distaste for the ever-worsening artist exploitation and the platforming of Joe Rogan, 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. This new set (link here and below) was one I started as a way to ease the anxiety I always get before I travel, that I have before this travel specifically — to help fill the spaces between job stuff and packing and boarding with the self-soothing I know I can do through music.

I’m not afraid of flying, although it isn’t an unreasonable concern. I like traveling. But the experience, from about a week before takeoff to the second I’ve returned home and bolted the door behind me, is angst city: a vast district of hypothetical worst-cases elbowing past each other in the cheap suits of the brain. So I’ve come up with strategies to turn the angst into controlled burns of productivity. Well in advance of the flight, I’m already drafting lists in my Notes app and portioning my vitamins into a Ziploc. And about eight years ago, I developed a superstition or magical-thinking scenario of sorts where I decided my entire mental health rested upon having a spotless apartment to come back to — to the feeling of fresh bedding, loose papers filed away, shelves in the fridge wiped down — I spend many of my free moments in the run-up worrying over everything being orderly enough. There’s no reason; it’s just another ritual to pour myself into under stress.

Plus, I’m off to Los Angeles, the city I called home for a decade, a town that’s extremely close to my heart but that I haven’t visited since a quick trip in 2018 — the pandemic happened of course, but even before 2020 I wasn’t keen on returning to the scene of the crime, to the memory of not-super-warm cohort vibes at the gradskool reunion, to the acrid post-breakup letdowns that kept on giving, to a glossy new portfolio of fuck-you rents for the saaaaaame crappy units. But I’m going. With trepidation. And excitement too, for all the beloved friends and tacos and movie houses I can fit into a handful of days.

This playlist emerged from that headspace. I was downloading all my Bandcamp purchases to throw them into iTunes, and then as I was listening back to the lot on shuffle I took a gander at Spotify to see which of the artists had presences there. I combined the Bandcamp faves with some other music I’ve had in recent rotation, and before I knew it… it was three hours and 37 minutes long. And there was Eleri Ward’s millennial indie-girl Sondheim with comely high notes that pull themselves back from the edge of razzle-dazzle to lead with the meaning, the knotty Tuareg guitar and nomadic tendé rhythmic traditions of Niger’s Les Filles de Illighadad, Ornette sideman Jamaaladeen Tacuma in 1986 making syncopated, slappy Seinfeld-raga, the wily citypop-vaporwave of Belfast’s Alpha Chrome Yayo, and Jóhann Jóhannsson sampling Joan La Barbara on the Arrival score. And a track from Alice Coltrane’s Kirtan: Turiya Sings, a 2021 edit of her 1982 Turiya Sings LP now with only her voice and the buzz of a Wurlitzer organ that sounds half Terry Riley Prophet-5 and half Nico/Ginsberg harmonium. Devotional sophisto, sung in Sanskrit.