Sad Songs and Waltzes
When James and I relaunched Moistworks whenever ago we had two unspoken house rules: bios on the contributors page had to be short and informal, and no direct mentions of lockdown or quarantine. By the time we broke the second rule, last month, it had begun to seem silly. Originally, we wanted to give folks in lockdown—people with kids, especially—a few moments of distraction (hence the playlists for children, etc). The pandemic seeped in, anyway.
I recall being struck, in the course of making this post about time and how strange time itself had become, by the way songs I’d never paid much attention to before now seemed so eerie and achingly timely and prescient. The pandemic seeped into them, too.
It seemed important to me that the corresponding playlist be exactly 24 hours in length (and not one minute longer), contain a neat number of tracks (400, in the end), and be arranged so that it sounded good straight through, as well as on shuffle. Every song had to be about time, in one way or another (the passing of the seasons counted). I broke that last rule just once, just so something would be broken, and the whole thing took so long, I ended up listening to songs like Skeeter Davis’s “End of the World” for hours on end. I was not at a loss for things to do then—I had plenty of work, kids to mind; one of my girlfriend’s sisters gave birth in NYC at the height of the pandemic (as did other close friends). Obviously, I’d gone out of my mind.
I made this playlist at around the same time but, for related reasons, never planned to make it public.
It’s not as direct as the songs—“Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” by the Police; “Corona,” by the Minutemen—that Spotify kept recommending. But I’m not sure that “Bad Moon Rising,” or “Take me Down to the Hospital,” are any less obvious. I wasn’t going for subtlety. A few songs did surface on playlists we posted later on. (“Isolation,” though I think we used Harry Nilsson’s version; Dead Moon’s “Fire in the Western World, which ended up on Rob Reynolds’ playlist.) “Slow Death’s” something I listened to a lot when I lived on the West Coast. The other day, on FB, Lou Barlow said:
“there's a coupla genres of music that i can listen to endless variations of.. i have playlists for early 60's Jamaican Ska and mid 60's U.S. garage rock that last for hours and make me immediately calm and happy.. today I'm going for the garage rock.. there are thousands of songs from bands pretending to be the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds etc. and I listen to it wayyy more than the bands that inspired it.. way more fun and f-ed up.. I tried to explain this to a fellow musician once and he was like 'I can never listen to enough Kinks and Rolling Stones, I don't care about that' .. don't be like him, the rabbit hole awaits”
I feel that way about “Slow Death,” which wants so badly to be a Rolling Stones song, sags for a moment in a way Stones songs from the same period do not, but gets to some places the Stones didn’t reach, anyway.
So: a weird, dude-heavy playlist that I went back to this week + hated less than I expected I would.
