#8 - first names
You can skip to this week’s playlist on Spotify or scroll to the end.
It’s been a month since I sent one of these, but I actually made this playlist immediately after sending the last one, when it was requested by Sarah Al-Yahya in response to the previous email. All the song titles are first names.
It made me think a bit about names, just first names. How they can be so personal, intimate, specific, while simultaneously very vague? Not only is Sarah, for example, a very common first name, it is also very cross-cultural. I know many Sara(h)s, Arab and north and south American, in my family, from my childhood, from school, college, work, pretty much every sphere of my life. But depending on the context, the single word can signal a whole range of sometimes overlapping but often wildly different universes. All the stories, emotions, and memories I associate with each Sarah I know. I love songs’ ability to create these types of vast associations.
I met Sarah Al-Yahya - who requested this playlist because she was bored in the library and finding excuses to procrastinate - when I was a senior, and she was a first-year, in undergrad. I remember one of the first conversations I had with her then. I walked by her talking to another friend at C2 (NYUAD’s “Campus Center”) and she told us about her family’s history in Palestine, a relative’s quest to unravel and document it, and recommended I listen to Lana Del Rey’s then just released NFR (a masterpiece). I remember her walking away and my friend and I just kinda looking at each other and going ‘she’s really great, huh?’. This was nearly 3 years ago but I still regularly think the same. I love this Closet Sessions performance from her then Amman-based high school (!) band Falak (Sarah on vocals and piano, fellow NYUAD student and friend Aya on oud).
The playlist starts with Chaeri, a track off Magdalena Bay’s Mercurial World, one of my favorite 2021 albums, and an album I genuinely recommend to literally anyone who might listen. You have to listen to it in full, in order, and bask in every perfect transition (including the loop from the last track back to the first one). Brings me so much joy. It ends with the beautiful Ophelia by Roo Panes; I particularly like his performance of it (and other songs I love) in his Mahogany Session. Brings me so much peace.
10 songs
(Spotify)
Chaeri - Magdalena Bay
Layla - Cairokee
Salma - Jadal
steve - Sydney Sprague
Annie - Manchester Orchestra
Sisyphus - Andrew Bird
Paul - Big Thief
marjorie - Taylor Swift
Zina - Babylone
Ophelia - Roo Panes