This is a June playlist

And some modest life updates

Good morning.

We just passed the longest day of the year, which means June is almost over and the summer has officially begun.

Like you, perhaps, I’m not feeling great about the state of the world. Things seem more precarious than ever and I’m honestly not sure how to feel each day.

I try to think about 1968 and whether or not things are better or worse than the way the world was then. I try to think about 2001. I’m reading a book about the Plantagenet dynasty in England and so I find myself thinking about whether or not things are better than when Henry II and Richard I were roaming the Isles and a constantly shifting European continent.

Things were scary in all of those times. And this is the time I’m living in now, so I’m trying to keep going. I’m trying to maintain relativity. But that doesn’t change the fact that things feel increasingly precarious with each passing day.

This month I did more wedding planning (it never ends even if our wedding isn’t even that big), I did my first live improv comedy performance in 10 years, I pet sat, I went swimming a couple times, I started rereading Ulysses, I saw Friendship and Jane Austen Ruined My Life in movie theaters, and I wrote a bunch of dumb blogs about movies and the years they came out in. The latter has given me much joy.

Mostly, I worked though. I worked and tried to be a source of reliability to the people I’m accountable for during uncertain and precarious times. It may not be enough, but that’s what I’m capable of.

This is a June playlist for you, if you like that kind of thing.

I’ll see you next time.

“We Got the Beat” by The Go-Gos

This song always makes me think of summer. I don’t know why. Maybe it's the way Belinda Carlisle says, “hang out by the poo-ool.” A timeless track, with just a hint of melancholy in its melody, that always sounds fresh no matter how many times you put it on.

“Relationships” by HAIM

We’ve been hearing a lot of HAIM on Sun Radio lately down here in Austin. My fiancee thinks this song sounds weird, but I dig it for whatever reason. It could be the early-90s sounding production. HAIM is a funny band. I hardly think about them at all and then a song like this will pop up and catch my attention. “The Wire” feels like a million years and several lifetimes ago.

“You Can Call Me Al” by Paul Simon

I heard this song at my training gym recently and it was one of those instances, which I’ve described here before, when a song you’ve heard a million times hits you unexpectedly and you have the profound realization that “this song is fucking sick.” When what was once wallpaper somehow becomes profound again when you intentionally pay attention to it. This is an astounding production. Everything hits exactly right. The 15 seconds from 2:15 to 2:30 when the main horn and keyboard hook comes back makes you understand what people are looking for when they go to a place of worship. Don’t care what this song is about. Jubilation has never been recorded better.

“Into The Old Man’s Shoes” by Elton John

This is one of my favorite Elton John tunes. It isn’t that well known because it’s not officially on any album—it’s a bonus track on the more recent reissues of Tumbleweed Connection (1970). But this is vintage Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Everything feels dramatic and widescreen and the production, especially the drums, sounds amazing. In August 2013, I was staying in a motel in Menlo Park. I was there with some friends from college to see two of our friends from college get married. I put this song on for my friends in my motel room. They were unimpressed. Never was the knife wedged more fully in my back. You all know who you are. But, if you’ve ever had a dad, I dare you not to listen to this song and not suddenly notice that it's getting dusty.

“100 Years Ago” by The Rolling Stones

Goat’s Head Soup (1973) is no one’s favorite Rolling Stones album, but it does have some great tunes and it, more than any other of their albums, sounds and feels like a very hot summer. This track is one of the Stones’s more creative compositions—its more like two or three songs combined. But the main part has such a worn down melancholy to it, that it sucks me in every time. This song does the best job of creating the feel of what it’s like to look back on a summer from Labor Day weekend and wonder where the time went.

“Everybody Is A Star” by Sly & The Family Stone

I added this track for the playlist before Sly Stone passed away at the age of 82 earlier this month. He’s a legend and a genius, everyone knows it. Well known too, is the troubled life he led. After watching Questlove’s documentary about Sly earlier this year, I’ve been thinking a lot about how few artists captured exhaustion and disillusionment better than Sly. This song has an inspirational message, but it sounds so tired as if the messenger(s) are barely holding on or can’t quite believe what they are saying anymore. And all of that combined gives this song a beatific air. It’s probably my favorite thing Sly ever did.

“One Headlight” by The Wallflowers

Bringing Down the Horse came out in May 1996 and I remember this song being huge that entire summer. At that time, I had no idea who Bob Dylan was, but I sure knew who his son Jakob Dylan was. This song reminds me of the winding drive down Christian Road from Stony Brook Harbor to Main Street on a humid night. If you know, you know. And if you don’t know, you’ve probably got something else like that you hold close to your heart.

“Read My Mind” by The Killers

Never liked the Killers all that much. I was a Strokes guy through and through and didn’t want anything Brandon Flowers was selling. When Sam’s Town came out in 2006, I was entering my senior year of college and my sister was entering her senior year of high school. I remember coming back for Thanksgiving break and she loved this album. I gave it a shot and this was the one song that really stood out to me. They’ve been playing it a lot on Sun Radio lately for some reason. And, you know what, I still think this is a great song.

“Hurtin’ or Healed” by A. Savage

A. Savage makes another appearance! I had slept on his 2023 album, Several Songs About Fire, but have been listening to a lot this spring. The more I listen to him, the more I think he’s the successor to Jonathan Richman. This is a nice drifting summer song.

“Tomorrow” by Wings

Talk about songs tailor made for summer! This is another one of McCartney’s overlooked gems. It’s from Wild Life (1972), which most people hate, but I happen to like. (I even like the title track.) This song is all effortless melody and lots of fun.

“You Only Live Once” by The Strokes

This song came out almost 20 years ago. It’s hard to believe because every time I hear it, I am immediately put into the large, somewhat Brutalist, library at the University College Dublin where I was studying abroad in the fall of 2025. I used to go to the library, not to study, but to get internet access on my beat up Dell laptop. I’d go there to log onto AIM to talk to my friends in America and really to spend time on Strokes message boards looking for bootlegs. This was in the period between Room on Fire (2003) and First Impressions of Earth (2006) when a gap of two years felt like forever to wait for a new record from a band that you loved. My friend Erik and I would talk on AIM, trawl the message boards looking for any kind of bootleg recording of a new song from a live show in Argentina or Brazil or some leak from the new album, and then immediately share it. When I first got my hands on this one, I was convinced that The Strokes had done it. They had figured out how to make their sound bigger and better and were about to release a third album that everyone in every country would love and that would bring about world peace. Didn’t quite turn out that way. But whenever I hear this track start, it still seems possible.

“Dead Man’s Party” by Oingo Boingo

I had a friend named Ryan Scales (I still count him as my friend even though I haven’t talked to him in awhile) that I spent a lot of time with in my twenties. Serializing fiction on Substack is a big topic of conversation now. And we had big dreams of making a website to do that back in 2008. Never went anywhere. He was the only person I knew who used to talk about Oingo Boingo. This song is so sick. Whenever the chorus starts, I can’t help but see Danny Elfman doing vocal takes as Jack Skellington.

“Don’t You (Forget About Me)” by Simple Minds

OK, now here’s where you say, “What? You’re putting this song on one of these playlists. This is one of the most overplayed songs of all time.” And, look, you have a very good point. But let me counter with this: I heard this on the radio driving home from the gym on a day when the heat was subsiding nicely into the evening and the light was getting to that nice orange and pink it does here in Texas and thought, “Fuck, this is such a good song and its so weird.” Listen to this song a little closer this time. The whole composition and the way it comes together is sort of strange for a hit.

“Sowing The Seeds of Love” by Tears for Fears

We’re keeping it with some great bands from the 1980s. This is a Tears for Fears track where they are really just trying to be The Beatles from Magical Mystery Tour (1967).

“When I Get Home” by The Beatles

I’ve been obsessed with the idea of John Lennon as a horizontal songwriter and Paul McCartney as a vertical one, as outlined in Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head (1994). Once you start thinking about it that way, you can’t stop hearing it in every song. Lennon insists the melody into the rhythm of a song, while McCartney builds a song from melody. This is a great example of this concept. There’s not much of a melody to this song, but the way Lennon sings this song creates melody, creates hooks. In listening to this song so many times, I realize this is why Lennon remains probably my favorite vocalist ever. He’s not the best singer, but what he does to a lyric through his vocal makes him so powerful. Here he unleashes his unparalleled way of saying “c’mon” like a weapon multiple times. He also manipulates the words “more” or “her” to do his bidding. He also uses the word “again” to display his unique gift of gliding syllables into a melodic hook—displayed best probably on “Imagine” or “A Day in the Life” or even “God.” No one else could sell the throwaway line, “I’m gonna love her til the cows come home.” Plus, McCartney goes absolute berserk in his early days screaming voice throughout the song on the backing vocals and that, paired with Lennon’s lead, make this song delightfully unhinged.

“Put A Little Love In Your Heart” by Jackie DeShannon

I was passing the time on Reddit, as I do, and was served up a thread on the Beatles subreddit about songs that sound like the Beatles but aren’t the Beatles. How could I resist? This one was mentioned several times. And, you know what? The Beatles subreddit community is right. This sure does sound like a 1967-1968 Beatles composition and production. A wonderful song.

“Blowin’ in the Wind” by Trini Lopez

On a recent flight to New York, I finally caught A Complete Unknown (2024). For what it was, I thought it was a solid movie. Chalamet was good and so was Elle Fanning even though she didn’t get much to do. Monica Barbaro’s performance as Joan Baez was overhyped though. Didn’t see much there, but that’s not her fault.

Anyway, it made me want to watch No Direction Home, Martin Scorcese’s 2005 documentary about Bob Dylan’s career up until 1966. It was better than I remembered—and I thought it was amazing when it first came out. When you put it up against the more recent Rolling Thunder Revue (2019) it’s kind of astounding at how sincere he was able to get Dylan to be in this documentary. He must have caught Dylan in a slight resting place in his self-mythologizing.

Anyway, this version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Trini Lopez caught my ear during this rewatch. It’s a little cheesy, but I like it.

“Lonesome Track” by Bob Marley & The Wailers

Earlier this month, I saw Walter Martin, formerly of The Walkmen, talking on Substack about an early Bob Marley & The Wailers vinyl that’s hard to find. He said it was his favorite album in his collection. This got me in the mood to listen to early Bob Marley. This is such a fun song. You can see how this sound influenced Paul McCartney. There is no “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da” without this song.

“Train in Vain (Stand by Me)” by The Clash

We have something of a train theme here. I heard this one in my training gym recently and it, again, was one of those cases of a very familiar song just hitting you the right way. I was driving home and I had some profound thought about this song, but now it’s lost to me. Rarely do you hear songs that sound and remain so alive like this. The Clash are an amazing band. Every year I love them more and more.

“Healing, Pt. 1” by Todd Rundgren

When I was staying at my parents house on Long Island at the end of May, I decided to rewatch Worst Person In the World (2022) for some reason. It was a good decision. That movie is phenomenal and was even better on a second watch.

But what it gifted me was hearing “Healing, Pt. 1” by Todd Rundgren. This song is on the soundtrack, but I didn’t notice it when I watched the movie in the theater when it came out.

It’s well known that I love Todd Rundgren. But I don’t know every inch of his extensive catalog and this one was new to me. But after hearing it, I kind of locked onto it.

On one of my last days at my parents house, I went to the local beach with my sister and my two nieces. It was perfect Memorial Day Weekend weather. We splashed around in the cold water of the Long Island Sound, built sandcastles, dug holes. Eventually, the tide went out and the sand bars the beach is known for began to emerge. I pointed them out to my six year-old niece and told her we could go out to them.

We walked through the cold water. Several times she got scared because we were getting far from shore and wanted to turn around. When it got too deep I carried her. Eventually, the water turned shallow again and we were standing on mounds of sand with shallow, lapping, translucent waves rolling across them. She loved it. Just the way I had loved it when I first moved to Long Island when I was nine.

Later, my sister dropped me off at my parents house. I was tired from the sun and the swimming and went for a jog to get some energy back. I jogged the way I usually do: down around the bend of Setauket Harbor called Scott’s Cove, through Poquott, until I reach Port Jefferson Harbor at the end of Washington Street.

The tide was low there too and kids were playing in the shallows with life jackets on, fresh from a kayak trip with their parents. I saw them playing and looked out over Port Jefferson Harbor to Pirate’s Cove. I gazed, not thinking, but constantly aware that a time would come when I would no longer be able to so easily see the world from this spot.

I jogged home. I listened to music. For some reason, I put on “We Are the Champions” by Queen. I hadn’t listened to that song in years. I let the melody of the song carry me, I let the song urge me on, to find that well of energy that only music can seem to pull from you when you are jogging for miles.

When I got back to my parents house, the sun was shining on the lawn and the grass was an impossible green. So I lay down on the grass and put on “Healing Pt. 1.” I lay on grass, looked at the sky, and pressed my palms against the earth. Listening to the music, I felt as if I could cry. Everything that had passed in my life had already passed. I would never be able to get it back again—not the way I once was, not the way I was as a child with my parents, not the way I was amongst my friends in my twenties.

And this place, this small corner of Long Island, would never look the same to me as it once had. But even so, it was so beautiful at this time of year and I was grateful that this was where I was able to begin to form my view of the world. I was so thankful for everyone I had known.

It would all be over at some point for me. It would no longer belong to me the way it once had. But it would continue, days like this, for other people until nothing was left.

“Healing Pt. 1” is about all of that. Because its about how music belongs to you. The lyrics and the music themselves are one thing—but what it lets you “meditate” on is something else entirely; something even more powerful.

I’ve never listened to a song that so encapsulated what music has done for me than this one.

“Til I Die” by The Beach Boys

I hadn’t planned to put this song on here, but then Brian Wilson died earlier this month at the age of 82 and I had to.

You can and probably have read plenty about Brian Wilson, his genius, his importance to music, and his importance to the very fabric of popular culture in the second half of the 20th century.

All I’ll say about Brian Wilson is that when I was going through my psychedelic era in my teenage years, I was obsessed with his lost SMiLE (1967) album. For anyone who loved music, the myth around SMiLE was legendary. It was the lost record: Brian Wilson’s answer to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) that drove him mad.

I scoured the internet of the day to find the official track list as well as official bootlegs of each track to create a version of the record that I could burn onto a CD.

SMiLE still contains some of the most beautiful, thrilling, and daring music ever recorded. But “Surf’s Up” was its ultimate achievement. When I was a teenager, with his mind freshly opened, the vocal coda of that song sounded to me like whatever salvation was supposed to be in religion.

I remember being on a ski trip with my friend at his aunt’s ski house in Okemo and making him listen to “Surf’s Up” in a little attic room and telling him that “this is what I want my writing to make people to feel.”

And that was my ambition then. There were two things you could shoot for: the ending of “Araby” and the ending of “Surf’s Up.” All the truth of the world lived in those two works of art.

But the song I put here is “Til I Die.” I put it here, because as much as I loved and still love “Surf’s Up,” this song has become, I think, my favorite Brian Wilson composition.

There is nothing quite like it. Abstract and despairing to start, the song eventually becomes a moving vocal symphony about accepting the mysterious and finite nature of life.

Rest in peace, Brian.