Isolation Playlist


1. "Where Or When," Peggy Lee

I sometimes listen to this song on loop when I'm deep in a writing project, and had it on repeat during much of this year of social isolation. I first heard the song in Miranda July's movie The Future, and fell in love — my favorite songs often come, magpie-style, from stealing others' good taste. The song has something deeply haunting and sad about it, which is the mood I'm often trying to cultivate while writing. The piano first tinkles in, then a muted horn — it's full of warmth, nostalgia, and loss. I love Peggy Lee's sweet, smoky voice and her hushed intimacy. There's a sense of mystery in this song about the origins of love and how we're drawn together. Peggy Lee hums quietly about the small miracle of human connection, which seems rare and precious and fragile as she sings it to life.

[Blair Hurley]



2. "I Put A Spell On You," Alice Smith

2021-01-15

Ontario has issued stay-at-home orders. We're allowed to leave to exercise, so I can still go for my hour-long midnight strolls. Lately, there is a pristine layer of snow coating the empty streets so when I turn around and look down, I can trace my steps all the way back home. The weirdest thing happened tonight though, I put my headphones on and as Alice's howling started, my body left the ground. I floated above my little condo, above the sparkling city and higher.

I had a moment to look down at it all; it didn't look angry or confused, just really quiet. 

[Sacha Bissonnette]



3. "Make Art Not Friends," Sturgill Simpson
 
This song noodles along for the first minute and a half, slows, drops off a sonic cliff and then takes flight. And while I'm up in the air with it, I can see a whole city. I want to do everything I can't and spectacularly so, to run drunk and trailing smoke into an 18-car pile-up of other humans, not caring whether anyone walks away. The instrumentation is all wattage and neon lights and euphoria, but Simpson sings like he's alone in his room, reading from his diary. The world's abuzz, see? But you're not in it. "Think I'm gonna just stay home and make art, not friends" is the refrain, is where you land when you come back down.

[Kara Vernor]



4. "Storms," Railroad Earth
 
I have a very distinct memory of this song: I'm walking home from a party near my place in Baltimore. It's the end of my MFA, I have no idea what I'm going to do for money starting in about five weeks, and this song comes on shuffle and hooks into my mood. You know that feeling when you are drunk but not too drunk, and you feel light, like the stars are closer and the breeze is cooler and the city is beautiful and the unknown is suddenly exciting instead of scary? (I'm a horribly cheerful drunk. Be warned, at parties I'll tell you how glad I am to be your friend.) I listened to this song and thought, right, storms. It's lucky that I have people to bunker down with, even while it's raging outside! (Again, I was in the very loving period of tipsiness.) During this pandemic-storm, I'm still listening and still (Zoom-)bunkering down with the people I love, waiting for the storm to pass.

[Gwen E. Kirby]



5. "This Year," The Coup

After Death

After they buried me in the earth and I became a tree, I grew tall enough to scrape the clouds and my roots reached so deep into the earth, I could peek at its core. Some time passed and a copse grew around me. Great friends, all of them! About two hundred years in, I turned to my right and said, What I miss most, I think, is flight; my feet no longer touching earth, wind in my hair. My tree friend replied, When you were a person you couldn't fly; people can't do that. You have imagined flight so intensely that you remember yourself in the skies, but you've allowed imagination in that life to become delusion in this one. Don't worry that you couldn't—that you can't—fly. Even the birds who soar and circle the blue can't bore into the earth and become friend to the subterranean depths as your roots have. They can't stand in the ground and at the same time converse with the clouds as you do. You have such nostalgia for the wind in your hair that you forget the wind in your leaves. To think of transcendence as only flight is to still think as a seedling. Transcendence isn't becoming a thing that you're not. It's not conjuring abilities that defy logic or the laws of science. Magic is only illusion and the unexplained is not inexplicable, only unrevealed. Trees fly only during the most vicious storms. Transcendence, my sapling, is mastering your current form before your impermanent self becomes something new. That's all.

[Rion Amilcar Scott]



6. "Siamese Dream," Smashing Pumpkins
 
During the pandemic, I've listened to the album Siamese Dream by the Smashing Pumpkins quite a bit. In fall 2020, I finished an essay I'd been drafting for on-and-off two years about the album. While down my research rabbit hole, I ended up spending a bit of time with the 2011 remastered deluxe album containing 31 songs. I already had many of the B-sides memorized from when the singles were released back in the day. But I was surprised to find a few new-to-me songs on the remastered version, including the one I chose for this playlist.

Although the song "Siamese Dream" didn't end up on the album of the same title, it definitely registers much of the loud-quiet energy the group embodied circa 1993. Billy Corgan's caramel thin voice layered over electric guitars has been a familiar comfort to me in isolation. Around the 3:11 mark, the mood of the song takes a contemplative, vulnerable turn, much like the shift all our lives took in March 2020.

[Ursula Villarreal-Moura]



7. "Heavy Balloon," Fiona Apple
 
This past summer during quarantine, I grew and harvested vegetables in pots on my porch. Some days, tending to these plants was the only reason I had to step outside my apartment. Other days, I went on foot to the grocery store, taking a shortcut across an open field. There, the weeds sprang up and were mown down, then sprang up again. Kudzu took over the woods at the edge of the field. Some of the leaves grew as big as my face. As I walked, I would listen to Fetch the Bolt Cutters on repeat. A refrain caught in my head like a spark: I spread like strawberries. I climb like peas and beans. A friend texted me; she was also listening to the album. Just wait for all those teen girls getting tattoos of strawberries and beanpoles, she said. I'm no teen, but as far as feminist anthems go, that one felt right. Perfect song. Perfect time for it.

[Jen Julian]



8. "At the Jazz Band Ball," Bix Beiderbecke & His Gang, 1927

I don't really have much to say about this song, other than I'm pretty
sure it singlehandedly got me through the pandemic (assuming I
actually get through the pandemic). It gave me the energy to get out
of bed in the afternoon... the energy to stagger into the kitchen and
make coffee... the energy to dance around a bit in the living room... and
the energy to go back to bed. It's a furious, spooky, playful
celebration. And best of all... no words!

[Ben Loory]



9. "I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)," Whitney Houston
 
I've spent the past seven months losing a pretty significant amount of weight. I did it by doing all the usual things—calorie counting, walking, etc., but once winter hit I had to find an exercise alternative, and what I decided was dancing on repeat to this song. I have no rhythm or sense of movement. It's pretty much a flailing around type of situation not unlike Alfonso Ribeiro's iconic Carlton Dance from Fresh Prince of Bel Air, but with the music turned up I try not to mind. I move to the song's poppy beat while wishing like Whitney I had someone else to dance with. Yet, I have myself, and I've been learning lately how that can be enough.

[LaTanya McQueen]



10. "Amateur Night," Dream, Ivory

Every morning, I drive to work. The grey roads, the blue-frozen sky.

Every night, I drive home.

In between there is this, sometimes: soft crying from the visitation rooms, inarticulate wails, tears, shouts, whispers, pleas.

In between there is this, sometimes: quiet, quiet, quiet.

Every morning, I drive to work. Every night, I drive home.

I've been listening to this song a lot lately. I like you, it ends. I like you. I like you. I like you.

I miss that soft feeling of a crush, that soft feeling of having someone whose presence makes your hands tremble. That soft feeling that, maybe tonight, you might not be alone.

That feeling I get when I'm beside you.

I've been listening to this song a lot lately when I drive to work, when I drive home.

I like you. I like you. I like you. I like you.

[Cathy Ulrich]



11. "Spit on a Stranger," Pavement

In late 2019, I was reading Tokarczuk's Flights and, finding myself in Philadelphia, took a fieldtrip to the Mütter Museum. Known for its collection of medical oddities, the Mütter was not as obscure, judging by attendance, as I'd anticipated. The halls of warped human skulls, conjoined fetuses in solution, and paper models of history's most grotesquely oversized colons were packed tight. The air was heavy with the breath of several thousand Thanksgiving hangovers. It was damp, and far too warm, but if I'd missed the coat check, so had most everyone else. At length, I found a temporary exhibit (mercifully, it was deserted), Spit Spreads Death, which covered the social history of pestilence going back to the Black Death and featured, more specifically, the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918-19 that ravaged Philadelphia. The city had waged a campaign to stop public spitting (banners flew, spitters were shamed), meeting much the same results as today's mask mandates. Rampant, flagrant failure to comply, anger in every beating heart, death, despair, bitterness, etc. A panel at Spit Spreads Death's exit dared visitors to wonder whether the next great pandemic had already begun. I knocked, ignorant as a 14th-century peasant, on the first length of wood I met. Now here's Pavement with "Spit on a Stranger."

[Charlie Sterchi]



12. "Cloudbusting," Kate Bush

This song feels like an incantation to me. I just know that something good is gonna happen. I don't know when. But just saying it could even make it happen. I listen to it walking, compulsively walking, trying to banish some of the frenzied sadness inside of my body. Can saying something good is going to happen make it happen? I don't know. Still, I'm trying to cloudbust.

[Kyra Baldwin]




13. "Easy (with Kacey Musgraves feat. Mark Ronson)," Troye Sivan

My emotional modulation has been completely off during this last year. Almost anything can bring me to laughter or tears, and pop music is one of the few things that allows me to recalibrate myself. It's as reliable as good fast food, and just as comforting.

When Troye Sivan's song "Easy" first dropped last summer, I enjoyed the lope of its synths and the lilt and smoothness of Sivan's voice. But I didn't really hear the song until a new version of it was released in December, with vocals from Kacey Musgraves.

I've probably listened to this new version of "Easy" about two hundred times now. The magic in the song lies, for me, in how Musgraves' plaintive "I know I'm not easy, darlin'" intersects with Sivan's joyous "This house is on fire, woo!", illustrating how the line between pleading and celebration is sometimes as subtle as the difference between a laugh and a sob.

"Easy," an anthem about confronting one's share of blame in a dying relationship and admitting that it was you who set the fire all along, reminds me that nothing can be taken for granted, and that nothing that's really worth it ever comes easy.

[Gina Chung]



14. "How Long Do I Have to Wait for You?" Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings

I first heard this album (Naturally, 2005) with my older brother, probably while driving around in his lavender 1990s Honda Civic. He has always introduced me to great music, starting when we were teenagers listening to cassettes through tinny car speakers. But we've lived on opposite coasts of the United States for almost two decades, so we don't have the chance to drive around together very often anymore. And sadly, Sharon Jones passed away in 2016.
 
Still, her voice and these guitar riffs are just as beautiful and immediate now. The lyrics feel apt while I'm doing so much waiting during the pandemic. Until I can see family and friends again, listening to music that we enjoyed together makes me feel closer to them.

[Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom]



15. "The Way Things Are," Fiona Apple
     
I am the fighter jet but also the bomber and the bomb crashing into you, exploding your bedroom, your bed, your mind, your goddam life; I'm the kind of girl that men call awful things and can't get enough of and won't fathom committing to and I don't care.

You are ten or fifteen years older or occasionally, like me, somewhere in your 20s. After this is over—us, I mean—you'll apologize when I call you out for this or that bullshit you pulled. Or if I'm the one apologizing, you'll tell me, "Whatever. You were a great lay."

In a decade and beyond, what I'll remember about these years—my 20s—is the solitude. The weightlessness: airy, sure, but also hollow, resonating the men whose fingers strum me like a guitar. Always, though, I hum my own song on the way home, my home, I always go back home where I never let the men I date enter. Not once. Lying in bed beside a stranger or a guy I hate or the ones in the bands was clean isolation.

The secret I learned in my 20s—and which I've spent the years after unlearning, unloving—is that in order to be lonely, you have to want somebody there. 

[Emma Smith-Stevens]



16. "Down Down the Deep River," Okkervil River

Is there any isolation quite like childhood loneliness? During lockdown, I found myself thinking a lot about my coming of age during the 80s, about 8-bit video games and sleepovers, but also about real and specific yearnings and sadnesses, the particular bafflement that comes from not yet knowing who you are, from wondering just who you'll be. Though not even from the 80s, this Okkervil River song somehow manages to conjure those liminal moments just right, to open doors to exquisite lonely places in my own memory. To me, these lyrics are burns from a sparkler held too tight at a party where nobody talks to you. They are the shock from an ungrounded outlet, the breathing on the other end of a call. They are wearing the wrong shoes to walk past the house of someone you think you might like a little, maybe, and worrying blisters until they pop. They are the way you'd described yourself, if you'd only been able to see yourself, standing right there, "a solid ghost."


[Alyson Mosquera Dutemple]



17. "Ten Years Gone," Led Zeppelin

She got me this wolf calendar. Every month a different wolf. February has two hairy hunters leaping over a log in unison. In high pursuit of something maybe. Serious eyes. Sharpfanged. But the tails are pointed straight up behind them like exclamation marks and they don't look very menacing because of it. Snowing here. Snowing in Wolfland too. I've been in the house so long. Yesterday I spent two hours staring at these wolves. Maybe they weren't gallivanting off to kill something. Maybe they were running away from their families so they have a chance at love. A forbidden love. My wife was from a town called Silverton. I was from Bayville. The people in Silverton were not permitted to kiss anyone from Bayville. And vice versa. There were two scrolls. One in the town hall of Silverton and one in the town hall of Bayville. Punishment: death. Or worse. One night she kidnapped me. Drugged and dragged me off. I woke up in Jersey City and she was saying our lives were going to be a lot of fun. What did that mean. She attempted to give me a Valentine but my hands were cuffed. I said, unstuffy me, pretty please. Later on it was snowing and we walked half a mile to the UPS store and I carried her sister's birthday present. Afterwards we got fried chicken and got married. On our honeymoon we razed both city halls to the ground. That was a long time ago. Everything was a long time ago. It could even be that the wolves are racing. No, most likely they are three things. In love. Hungry. Trying to be the first one to get the neck of the thing. Latch on. Murder it. Offer it as a dead red gift to their sweetheart.

[Bud Smith]





The Isolation Playlist can be streamed here.

Read more of these writers' work in the archive.







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