three-song playlist: all the things i need

Are you the kind of person who can listen to the same song on repeat for long, long stretches of time? You must understand, then, how regular mixtapes can sometimes seem like a lot – they make me dissolve into a skip-button-abusing maniac, manually editing out nearly everything in trying to get to the same three things over and over. Tonight, I chose to simplify.

I’m feeling heavy songs that sound like portions of their music have been subtly, secretly reversed. I’m wearing a linen-and-lace romper the color of a living room wall and brushing my hair (I wish I could tell you I was counting the strokes. I’m not). I’m watching halves of Mommie Dearest and marveling at the eyebrows and horrible parenthood on display.

Almost funnily opposite my rabid, nearly militaristic ideas about how important the Utmost of Subjectivity is in poetry and prose is my need for the lyrics of love songs to be as universal and vague as possible. “Just wanna get next to you, boy.” This song is perfectly thirsty and sensual…and bizarrely unlike any other Chemical Brothers song I’ve ever heard, which is another thing I love: when good bands write one song that’s entirely different-sounding from their usual (like here, on the best hidden track of all time: skip to 3:35, this song is always so great that I think I just made this a four-song playlist).

William Basinski is a longtime favorite of mine, courtesy of walks in the woods that I would take with a good friend in high school. He was a DJ and had music on always, even there – we’d bring a small boom box into the forest and play the Disintegration Loops for a while while we leaned back onto the moss and made ink drawings. His were so much better than mine. Two days ago, the recordings turned a decade old along with a horrible tragedy. I spent some time listening to this and reflecting, and now I can’t seem to stop.

I’m convinced this song does to me what I think Adele must do to normal people. It’s also another clear case of delicately-delivered, super-simple lyrics driving me up the wall. The footage of Paz de la Huerta falling around everywhere is really poignant in this video somehow. I think Lana del Rey’s plastic surgery is really, freakishly beautiful, also, although I’m not sure if I can express to you just how much I hate that she goes by the canned-chanteuse name “Lana del Rey” and not her real one, which is Lizzy Grant.