#27 - songs about songs
In discourse around [leaving] Spotify and other streaming services, which I’ve seen a lot of lately, there’s often talk of the algorithm - or their recommendation system - as a vehicle of music discovery. I’ve thus spent a lot of time, initially out of frustration, but then, the more I thought about it, out of gratitude and bewilderment, reflecting on all that non-algorithmic music discovery has gifted me.
I think about all the dear friendships that have been forged through sending music back and forth, about the love and tenderness that can accompany a simple ‘thought you might like this album.’ The first track on this playlist, I Wear A Shirt That Says Australia, is off an album a friend listened to once and sent my way recently, and I’ve listened to it many more times since. I sent the album to another friend, who noted the lyric “I listened to I’ll not contain you”, which I hadn’t yet noticed but names the song by The Microphones (aka Mount Eerie), one of our mutual favorite artists. I’ve loved the track Higher Taste off that album, which has the lines: “I’ve been pretending to learn // I’ve been attempting to lean // Into life, into love, into losing myself in the right way."
I think about leaning into life, into love, into losing myself in the right and sometimes the wrong ways, and all the joy and wonder and curiosity that comes with. Music discovery, and art appreciation more broadly, I have been learning, is a practice. In a way, this newsletter is my own little version of committing to that practice. I told someone the other day that I, somewhat ironically, don’t actually listen to playlists very much; the overwhelming majority of the time I’d rather just put on an album front to back. When I started this newsletter, though, and placed a few arbitrary rules - such as not being able to repeat songs - I enjoyed the idea that it’d force me to continuously discover new songs, there’s only so much recycling I can do.
Another arbitrary playlist rule I hold dear is an annual one. In 2020, I made a playlist of a song each off 20 albums I loved that came out in 2020, and decided to grow the playlist by a song each year. Last night, I wrapped up my 25 albums of 2025 playlist; certainly the most difficult to cut down yet. It’s a promise to myself to grow more curious with age, to be excited for 2050, where I’d finally get enough spots for 50 new albums, and hope to still find it difficult to narrow the list.
I’m lucky to have had so many sources to enrich my love for music discovery, such as a stellar curation of free shows I would have likely never come across otherwise at my university’s Arts Center, or tuning in to my friends and professors’ radio shows every week. I’ve been learning that to let art in, you may need to be patient and humble, to recognize that you do not yet know all there is you may love, that it may take you a while to love a work but that love can last much longer, that the love can follow unexpected pathways. Let’s Dance to Joy Division from this playlist is a song by The Wombats, who I saw in 2018 on my first-ever trip to NYC, and to Brooklyn Steel, where their first opening act was a then much smaller band called Nation of Language. I haven’t listened to The Wombats in many years; Nation of Language has been my favorite band for the last five. (I call quite a few bands my favorite, but I mean it every time.)
This isn’t to say that I don’t have specific leanings - particular genres and artists and themes I come back to over and over - but I see the common root of both deep love for the familiar and curiosity about the unfamiliar to be intention. Algorithmic curation, much like data aggregation (also known as Spotify Wrapped), often lends itself to passivity. I have, of course, found great music through songs auto-played by recommendation algorithms. And I have been a last.fm user for years, so I do love looking back at the data on what I have been listening to. But the promise of data is often to illuminate what is otherwise hidden, while in reality it flattens what is otherwise rich, and complex.
My favorite end-of-year music reflections are where friends, or even critics, took the time to think about what music has meant a lot to them, and why, in ways that data could never capture. Maybe it’s not the song you mindlessly played over and over as background noise while you file paperwork, but the album you heard just once or twice, at just the right time, in just the right place. I am uninterested in a world where the ‘AI playlist’ feature replaces agonizing over the order in which I place songs on a playlist no one will really listen to, or where a large language model replaces writing, and deleting, and writing, and deleting, to get just the right feeling across in a letter, to take the time to figure out what it even is in the process.
I am uninterested in my music taste laying down at my feet, produced exclusively through an algorithm written by a distant software engineer. I want to check out the songs referenced in my favorite songs, the artists loved by my favorite artists, my friends’ bandcamp drops and neighborhood shows. I want to ask my bodega guy what the Yemeni song playing is, I want to listen to a fascinating geneology of ska music history told by a fellow volunteer at my clothing distribution, I want my friends to text me for recommendations, I want to text them back, to ask what else is going on.
I don’t care to only see the data, the numbers, and let it tell me what to infer about myself, or about you. I’d like to sit down and think and write and reflect and converse, and learn much more about myself and my loved ones than about the music in the process. And you know, maybe the real music is the friends we make along the way. Is the memories, the shows, the radio show chat boards. Is the life, is the love, is losing ourselves in the right way.
This is 10 songs that reference specific songs (I Wear A Shirt That Says Australia referencing I’ll Not Contain You), musicians (Little Simz referencing The Streets’ Mike Skinner), or music more broadly (World Love). But really, I just wanted to write.
10 songs
(Tidal / Spotify / pick your platform)
I Wear A Shirt That Says Australia - Champion Trees
El Qalb El Tani - El Far3i
new david bowie - Jim Legxacy
Strange Overtones - David Byrne, Brian Eno
Let’s Dance to Joy Division - The Wombats
Gorilla - Little Simz
Sunblind - Fleet Foxes
Punisher - Phoebe Bridgers
Star Treatment - Arctic Monkeys
World Love - The Magnetic Fields