It’s rainy season here in Alberta and the last couple of days have been gray and dreary. Spring is an interesting mashup of beautiful bright days, bright colours, and new life, and the necessary rain, gray, and clouds the Earth can’t do without. This year we have an added bonus; lockdown! It all combines for a lot of moodiness and emotion. What goes great with that? You guessed it, music.
Music can soothe in times of sadness and uncertainty, or it can inspire and invigorate. It’s sometimes nice to be able to sit in all that moodiness but it’s really easy for it, along with music, to slip into sadness. As the weather slipped into its moodiness, it sent me in search of music to maintain that balance and be in the background while I worked. To that end, I’ve created a Spotify playlist and am making it public for everyone to enjoy, or question, whichever you prefer.
You can also go here if you want to listen in Spotify.
If you knew me in the ’80s and early ’90s, you might know that I made a lot of mixtapes. I wasn’t the kind of person who made them and then gave them away. I made them and then made my friends and family listen to them when we were in the car. A typical 90 minute mixtape would take me 4 or 5 days to put together, carefully selecting the order and the flow. Of course there was the fact that I had to fade them in and out correctly and ensure that I programmed each side of the tape so there wasn’t a long gap, or a cut-off song, at the end of a side. I’m now a Cybersecurity consultant, not a music producer… The reason I say all of this is not to brag about my mixtape creating prowess, but to say this playlist is not like those mixtapes.
The Spotify playlist is a different beast for many reasons, but mainly it’s different because most people listen to Spotify on shuffle. Therefore all that effort to carefully plan out a playlist so that it flows from one song to the other is wasted. As are albums when programmed the same way so remember that the next time you shuffle your favorite artist’s carefully planned album 🙂 This playlist is four hours of music you can listen to in any order you want, and I made it in a few hours while doing other things (it’s so easy!).
I hope it’s not depressing; enjoy?
I Have Things to Say About Music 