Good morning,
There’s about a week left in February and I figured it was time to share a playlist.
It’s been a quiet month. After being in the Northeast for most of December and January, it’s been nice to finally get settled in our place in Austin. We’ve only actually been living on our own here for about three and a half months and we’re slowly finding out what our life might be like here—while also taking tentative steps toward planning a wedding.
In the next month or so I’ll be watching professional tennis at the ATX Open on the WTA tour, seeing Jenny Lewis play downtown, seeing Neko Case play downtown, seeing Rachel Bloom perform her one-man show, seeing Joe Pera do his thing, and seeing The State in one of their reunion shows. We’re starting to plan things and do things here. And it feels nice.
This month’s playlist dabbles around with songs that touch on February things: hearts, men, women, queens, dudes, shadows, crushes, baby(s), blues, loves, leavings, remorses, bad friends, lonelinesses, and joys. I don’t know that it feels like February, but I think it contains enough of the things that make up the month to make it an appropriate listen as we countdown to Leap Day.
I’ve provided commentary as is becoming custom. I don’t know if anyone likes it when I do this, but I very much enjoy writing about all of these songs.
Until next time.
“Little Queen” by Heart
Like a lot of guys my age, I got burnt out on Heart after hearing “Barracuda” too many times on classic rock radio. But if there’s one song that can convince you of Heart’s greatness, this one is it. This song is the title track from their second album—the one that features “Barracuda.” But “Little Queen” absolutely blows “Barracuda” away: It is funkier, more interesting, and once you hear it for the first time you kind of can’t stop hearing it.
“Stumble and Fall” by Darlene Love
Everyone loves “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” but I like this one better.
“Explorers of the Heart” by Music Go Music
I really don’t listen to anything by Music Go Music, but this song has followed me for the past decade: in supermarkets, in pharmacies, in restaurants, and on radios. No matter how many times I listen to “Explorers of the Heart,” it makes me feel like my heart is going to explode. Is it derivative of ABBA? Of course! But that’s the point!
“Tell Him” by The Exciters
This one never gets old. “I know something about love…” is like the first sentence of a great short story or novel. A genius production by Leiber & Stoller.
“Any Major Dude Will Tell You” by Steely Dan
I went for a little “songs with tell in the title” link here. That’s pretty much it. Plus, the song has “half a heart” in the lyrics too. But you don’t ever really need an excuse to put this one on.
“Crush on You” by Lil’ Kim
My training gym usually plays random playlists on Spotify. One week early this month they were playing a 1990s Rap and R&B playlist. This one came on and maybe I knew it when I was younger, but hearing its hypnotic beat loud over speakers was a revelation. In 1997, when I was thirteen, Lil’ Kim was sex education and, hearing this song now, she still kind of is. Plus, B.I.G has an uncredited vocal on the chorus. Might have been one of the last things he recorded.
“You Shadow” by Sharon Van Etten
Had to put something shadow related on a February playlist. I loved this song when Remind Me Tomorrow first came out in 2019 and it's been a staple on playlists I’ve made over the past five years.
“Baby Blue” by Badfinger
Sometimes you can feel yourself getting ready to dive back into a band’s catalog. I can feel that happening with Badfinger. This song is from the 1971 album Straight Up, their second-best album after 1974’s Wish You Were Here, which is one of the greatest unheralded rock albums out there. It makes me sad that a lot of people know “Baby Blue” mainly from the very end of Breaking Bad. Remember how crazy everyone was about Breaking Bad? The more I think about it, lord, were we out of our goddamn minds.
The best thing I got from Breaking Bad was having friends over to watch the finale in my small studio apartment at the corner of Pacific and Hoyt streets in Brooklyn. Five of us sat around my TV that was far too big for the apartment to watch whatever the hell Walt was up to fighting those neo Nazis. A guy I used to know named Nick had shown up with a bottle of tequila. When he walked in, he was pretty drunk. And he said, “Every couple of years I drink an entire bottle of tequila in one night. Tonight is one of those nights.”
I was 27 years old on the night of the Breaking Bad finale, which probably made Nick 29 or 30. He’s married and lives in Boulder now—I think. I had a lot of good times with him and hope he’s doing well. I met him in September of 2007 after I’d graduated college that May. I’d been living with one of my childhood friends in Fredericksburg, Virginia for a month as he finished his last semester of college. Nick had graduated two or three years before and had come down to visit. I gave him and a couple other guys a ride back to Brooklyn. We hit it off and then became friends when I moved to Brooklyn in 2008.
If you’re lucky, life can feel incredibly long.
“Out Of My Head” by Fastball
This song is twenty-five years old and I feel like I’m in a perpetual state of realizing how fucking good it is. It hit number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1999 and really should have gone higher than that. (Some tough competition in the Top 10 though.) These guys are from Austin. Who knew?
“The Apartment Song” by Tom Petty
I don’t know if there’s much more to want from a Tom Petty song. This track rocks in the purest way possible. This is one of those Petty album cuts that probably should be much better known. The lyrics in the chorus go like this, “Oh yeah, I’m alright / I just feel a little lonely tonight / I’m OK most of the time / I just feel a little lonely tonight.” I mean, that’s pure genius. Who hasn’t felt that way?
“And She Was” by The Talking Heads
For some reason, I’ve heard this song on the radio several times in the past few weeks and out at restaurants and coffee shops. This is one of those early education Talking Heads songs that you kind of get past pretty quickly but then, as you get older, it springs up again on you and makes you pause for a moment and appreciate how well the whole thing is done. Fun fact: this song was in Look Who’s Talking (1989).
“Silhouette” by Julia Holter
Have You In My Wilderness (2015) is one of my favorite albums of the last decade. What makes Holter unique, to me, is her ability to create, in her music, a sense of epiphany that you often encounter in the best short stories. The epiphanies in her music appear seemingly out of nowhere and are brief glimpses of the eternal that quickly disappear. Her music has continued to push boundaries since Have You In My Wilderness—just listen to her brand new “Spinning”—and she’s now closer to late period Talk Talk than Hejira-era Joni Mitchell. But if you haven’t listened to her before, this is a great place to start.
“Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth” by Primitive Radio Gods
An iconic 1990s alternative rock track. So dope it was featured on The Cable Guy (1996) soundtrack. This song is an amazing production. “Plane takes off in Baltimore and touches down on Bourbon Street” is a lyric that will always be embedded in my brain.
“Supermarket” by Wet Leg
My fiance loves Wet leg’s self-titled debut from 2022. I like it every time it's on but haven’t given it a close listen. She’s been listening to it again and this song has really jumped out to me.
“She’s Leaving Me Because She Really Wants To” by Lyle Lovett
Heard this one in a sandwich place called Food Heads near our house. We usually walk there to get lunch on Mondays and sit outside and eat in the sun. Hearing this song as I placed my lunch order and then stepped outside to enjoy a sunny, sixty-five degree February afternoon feels like a distillation of my life right now.
“If Not For You” by Olivia Newton-John
This song was written by Bob Dylan during his Woodstock recluse era. George Harrison released, for many, the definitive version of the song on All Things Must Pass (1970). But Olivia’s is the one that I go back to the most these days. Dylan’s version is nervy—he knows what he wants to express but isn’t sure exactly how to express it and the album cut he chose reflects this. Harrison’s is soulful and romantic—George at his softest. Olivia’s is honest and euphoric. She’s in love and she means it—and being loved by her is a gift.
“Way Back Into Love” by Hugh Grant ant Haley Bennett
This song was written by the late, extremely great, Adam Schlesinger who was one of the earliest celebrity casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic. Schlesinger was one of the great pop songwriters of the last thirty years and this song is at the center of the great romantic comedy Music and Lyrics (2007) starring Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore. It is a great song.
In the beginning of the summer of 2008, two of my closest friends from college and I were recovering after a night of taking mushrooms. It was one of those hot June days where summer in New York first rears its head. We were drinking Mountain Dews for some reason and watching Music and Lyrics. Watching the movie put us in the mood to write a birthday song for one of our close friends from college. My memory tells me we wrote the song and recorded it that day and then played it for her at her birthday party that night. But that can’t be true. Or maybe I have it exactly right. That moment feels both like it happened 100 years ago and also as if it happened last week.
“Solo” by Frank Ocean
This came on as I was leaving dinner at a restaurant called Vic and Al’s. It’s a kind of Austin place where you can go in at like 9 o’clock on a Saturday Night and just sit down and get a good meal and a cocktail. No waiting. No need to use Resy. I saw someone bring a big rabbit in one night and sit with it on her lap while she waited for her food. Frank is no one’s favorite right now. But, gosh, remember when this album came out? This song still sounds so good and the decisions in the production and performance are so specific.
“One Year Stand” by Frankie Cosmos
A friend of mine from college first introduced me to Frankie Cosmos, about a decade ago, as the daughter of Kevin Kline and Phoebe Kates. I haven’t really listened to or followed her releases. My fiance was playing her album Inner World Peace (2022) earlier this month and this was the song that caused me to ask who it was. She told me and here we are.
“Head Over Feet” by Alanis Morissette
A staple of lots of programming blocks on Sun Radio—just the way it was on Z100 in 1995. You all know this one. Doesn’t sound a day older than it did when Jagged Little Pill came out.
“Dilemma” by Nelly and Kelly Rowland
I was walking back to my house on a sunny afternoon the other week and heard this song blaring from a nearby home. I think someone doing facade repairs (or lawn work) at one of the old historic houses in my neighborhood was playing this over their stereo. Had completely forgotten about this song. I’ve heard it twice since then: once at a gas station and another time at a restaurant in East Austin. Just a jam.
“Bad Friend” by Gruff Rhys
At this point, you should know that I love anything Gruff Rhys (of the Super Furry Animals) does. His solo album American Interior (2013) is an absolute gem that I highly recommend. This song is from his latest record, Sadness Sets Me Free (2024). Trust me when I say that it’s a classic Gruff Rhys production. And it fits into the lineage of love songs that are actually songs of remorse, but with a unique lyrical spin.
“20 Million Things” by Lowell George
This has become, perhaps, my favorite love song of all time. I think it's the most realistic expression of what it feels like to be in a long term domestic relationship. It captures the way you want to love your partner unconditionally, but sometimes can’t seem to; it captures the way you want to remember to do chores for them but then forget because something else crosses your mind; it captures the way things are always kind of falling apart in life but amid all that the one thing that grounds you is the fact that all you want to do is think about the person you love. This song also features one of the great and subtle closing moments you’ll ever hear.
“Congratulations” by Cliff Richard
What a delightful little love song! I learned about this one on a podcast I was listening to on George Harrison’s triple album All Things Must Pass. George stole the tune for “It’s Johnny’s Birthday,” the birthday song for John Lennon he included on the “Apple Jam” portion of the album that makes up the third disc. Just a bit of pure joy to bring things home.