Well, it’s been a while. I don’t have a good reason for why I haven’t written music picks since December 2018. It’s not like I have stopped listening to music. Some of what I’ve been listening to is in this thread on Twitter, and some of it has been popping up on my instagram stories.
I’m planning to get back into posting album recs soon, but I figured I’d ease back into this thing by posting links to a few playlists that I’ve built over the last 9 months. A majority of my playlists come from me hitting “shuffle all” on my phone when I’m driving. Sometimes I’ll hit 4 or 5 good songs in a row that really work together, and then I will usually start building a playlist around other stuff that fits thematically. Sometimes I just have a neverending string of perfection, other times it’s a couple of tracks that are jams and then slowly adding other good jams as I think of them or find them.
Anyway, here’s a handful of playlists that have gotten a lot of listens by me in 2019–they’re all summer focused because my brain operates seasonally and has been in summer mode for at least 4 months–and they all work just a good shuffled as they do in order:
Neverending Spring
A light, sweet playlist for a fun Saturday morning. This is the one playlist here where order matters: it progresses from very mellow to less mellow.
Aaa Weird Goth Summer
A dark playlist that’s full of left turns, lots of punk-adjacent music and plenty of bummer lyrics. Uh but it’s still, like summery and fun. This playlist was 100% created by hitting shuffle on my library and at some point I decided it worked.
Is This Summer 2019?
This started as a playlist of tracks from movies and evolved from there. It’s pretty chock full of total jams.
The Hobbit
My daughter did a book club with some friends this summer and they read The Hobbit. I did a book club for the Hobbit in 2012 and this was the playlist (well, this is what I could find on streaming services). I don’t think she listened to it, but it’s perfect for reading the Hobbit, in my opinion.
Also, I used to do an actual mix podcast with a good friend. You can listen to the episodes still here. My playlists are labeled as by Moon Cities. But listen to the mixes that Scholastics did, they’re better.