#3 - dreams
You can skip to this week’s playlist on Spotify or scroll to the end.
I love the simplicity and double meaning in these lyrics in opening track No Good At Lying by Charlie Hickey:
I'm no good at lying
On my back or through my teeth
But I'm good at dreaming
I'm so good at dreaming
I could do it in my sleep
This week’s songs are about conscious and subconscious dreams: chasing them, running from them, reaching them, and mourning them. Dreaming alone, dreaming with another, and dreaming in community. Dreams about yourself, people you love, or our societies at large. From the hopeful, ambitious, aspirational fantasizing to the anxious, worst-case-scenario, doomsday overthinking.
Dreams Come True by Brandon Flowers is (was?) kind of my dramatic victory song. But it was the last song I played on a kayak in Dubai before my late and beloved phone dove into the sea, so now it’s my ‘you’re so dumb your phone fell in the sea’ song. Everyone always asks me if the phone was okay afterwards when I tell this tragic story. I don’t know, it’s in the sea.
I wanted to not repeat artists in the first 5+ playlists / 50+ songs, but Hamza Namira (whose song I had in ‘little freedoms’) seems like a worthy exception. Hamza was my first concert, I think, at Cairo’s Al Azhar Park in 2010. The second (of ten or so) time I saw him perform was at Tahrir Square in February 2011. My friends and I were going around the square singing* a new song about the revolution (including to CNN and MBC camera crews). People suggested we go to the main stage and, while waiting backstage, we saw Hamza Namira waiting for his turn. We started jokingly singing the song on this playlist, Ehlam Ma’aya (Dream With Me), to catch his attention as he laughed. After we sang on stage alongside a guitarist we’d met minutes ago, Hamza went on and sang Ehlam Ma’aya, a message of hope and determination.
This playlist has some of my favorite feel-good songs. I hesitated to add Lowkey’s Dreamers to the end because, well, it’s quite sad (CW depression / suicide). But it was recently on my mind. I grew up listening to and being shaped by Lowkey’s music. It was only months ago (better late than never) when I started listening to and falling in love with The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill that I realized Dreamers is very much sampling Ms. Lauryn Hill’s To Zion (ft. Carlos Santana). For some reason that made me really happy.
Anyway, here’s to dreamers.
Happy February 11th.
10 songs
(Spotify)
No Good At Lying - Charlie Hickey
The Dream Synopsis - The Last Shadow Puppets
Dreams - The Cranberries
Imagination - Foster The People
Dreams Come True - Brandon Flowers
Dreams - Fleetwood Mac
The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness - The National
Ehlam Ma’aya (Dream With Me) - Hamza Namira
Dreamland - Bob Marley & The Wailers
Dreamers - Lowkey ft. Mai Khalil
* I absolutely cannot sing.