Like a lot of people, I draw comfort from creating playlists to commemorate a flash of feeling or a period of time. Every couple weeks (or days), I declare a New Start and start assembling a fresh set list. Right now, though, I’m feeling reflective. Here are songs that have brought me stamina over the past two calendar cycles.
January: “Mary” by Big Thief
“Mary” admittedly doesn’t have “January” in the title, but the month is in some of its most piercing lyrics: “And my brain is like an orchestra / Playing on, insane / Will you love me like you loved me in the January rain?” “Mary” is one of those songs that sounds quiet no matter how loud you play it, and demands attention effortlessly. Listening to this song, I feel its lyrics winding tight around my internal organs. It’s something about the building instrumentation and the way Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker sings. I chose this song for January because I wanted to recognize the melancholy of the month. We all know that New Years is sparkly and fresh, at least in theory, but there are 30 long days that follow: days of painfully early sunsets and half-melted snow banks turned dingy and gray from the residue of passing cars. Plus, there’s the ache that follows the self-reflection of drafting New Year’s resolutions. Am I becoming who I want to become? It’s a big question, and it’s okay to be sad and confused and curious in the month after asking it, especially when you’re inevitably spending a lot of time inside, wondering whether all those things written about love are really true.
February: “February – Audiotree Live Version” by Beach Bunny
No song could better communicate the longing for warmth and affection that peaks during these 28 days of deep winter. February is a deeply scary month, and it often feels endless. I can’t figure out where February gets its power, but it’s something about how the sky is so often white (not even cloudy, just blank and dim and staring), and how the fun part of winter is over but spring feels so distant still. Holidays are supposed to bring light and joy, and instead February gives us Groundhog Day. This song serves general February angst, and if you’ve experienced something cataclysmic happen during the month, “February” lends a validating soundtrack to that, too. Through both routine frustration and blinding grief, the truth still holds: “Maybe by Monday I’ll be okay / Any day’s better than February.”
March: “Waters of March” performed by Art Garfunkel (originally by Susannah McCorckle)
I vividly remember the first time I heard this song, sitting in the empty belly of Founders, Haverford’s then temporary library, on a Sunday afternoon. Yellow light flowed through the windows in wide yellow shafts, company to the tinny guitar in my headphones. “Waters of March” sounds like it was written by a crow who collected a bunch of shiny objects (“The beat of the road / A slingshot stone / A fish, a flash / A silvery glow”) and strung them together with soft, percussive strumming. It’s mesmerizing, but it’s also the kind of song you can easily forget, which feels true of March. If you were to ask someone to list the months in non-chronological order, I’m sure March—the middle child of months—would come in dead last. But Art, with his gentle voice, reminds us that even in long expanses of murky, unremarkable time, there are shining moments: little trinkets in the mud.
April: “April Come She Will” by Simon and Garfunkel
“April Come She Will” wins bonus points on multiple accounts: first, it personifies months as women—we love that. Second, you can play a fun game by opening the YouTube audio of this song in several tabs simultaneously, staggered several seconds, and listening to Simon and Garfunkel harmonize with themselves in a tingly, overlapping round. The lyrics are sweet and simple, though I think there is something profound about that first line. “April Come She Will” is a profession of certainty, a way of saying yes, it gets cold every year, but then comes a holiday to celebrate resurrection. Tulips are brainless and continue to bloom in the middle of a pandemic.
May: “Maggie May” by Rod Stewart
This is an odd song about a young man who is ensnared by an older woman (“But you turned into a lover, and, mother, what a lover you wore me out”) and regrets it. The story behind the song is undermined by Rod Stewart’s wizened voice, which hardly sounds like it belongs to a young guy who needs to “collect [his] books and get on back to school.” I don’t find too much meaning in the verses or the lyrics, though. What feels important is, first, the intro (0:00-0:46): the resolved major chord at 0:25, the slow intake of breath, and then the beautiful guitar starting up again at 0:30. And then, the outro: after a warm, bubbly guitar solo, at 4:26, the mandolin strumming on the high notes in harmony with the bass. It’s repetitive and it builds; it is joy and the sound of daffodils and your body leaning way out of a bedroom window late at night. Before the song ends, Rod starts singing along with the mandolin, lyrics that convey agony in their words but reckless pleasure in their delivery.
June: “You Have to Dance (Feet)” by Esperanza Spalding
Esperanza Spalding is probably the best musician alive, and this song is an example of her genius: layered musically and lyrically and emotionally. I can’t say for sure what the song’s about (perhaps a reclaiming of the “magical negro” trope coined and critiqued by Spike Lee and Morgan Parker). I do know that Spalding does away with the normal shape of a song, instead letting it build and swell, using repetitive vocal lines as instrumentation. Ultimately, “You Have to Dance (feet)” is a manifesto: “And I claim it, yes, I’m magical / You can never be too magical.” In June, I feel blessed by this song. Everything is opening up at once, and it’s good to be reminded that you can’t have too much magic.
July: “Do You Remember” by Chance the Rapper (ft. Death Cab for Cutie)
This song is for July because it’s about summer and that frantic feeling of not wanting something to end while you’re fully immersed within it. Nostalgia for a moment as it’s happening: what a wild feeling! The song itself is an odd mix of a springy backtrack, Ben Gibbard’s over-pronounced vowels, and Chance’s gravelly, sensitive vocals. The stanzas build toward a set of lines that spurt upward like a fountain from the mouth of a stone lion: “This story arc so sharp that it made the streets flood / This the type of covenant you keep love, deep love.” I don’t really know what these lines mean—finding God, or maybe the person you want to be in love with forever? Either feels appropriate for quiet, regal July.
August: “Pynk feat. Grimes” by Janelle Monáe
The music video for Janelle Monae’s “Pynk” is lush splendor, dripping with August. A desert landscape glistens through a magenta lens, a red popsicle drips to the beat, quick cuts and gentle breezes pick up people’s hair. There’s satin and gasping laughter in the corners of each shot. Eye contact is prolonged, and skin shines in the sun. This video and song deserve a hundred awards and a thousand scholarly papers dissecting its every frame. August feels different every year, but what’s constant is the feeling of exhalation: a release of hot breath before the intake of new air.
September: “September” by Earth Wind and Fire and “September Grass” by James Taylor
September gets two songs because it’s my birth month and has always represented a double new start: new age, new school year. The lyrics of “September,” aren’t the most profound (“Badu, badu, badu-du, badu”), but what’s important is the divine balance of longing and joy. I’m sure everyone has had a year when it felt like things weren’t growing in the right direction. It’s easy to cling to a sepia-toned vision of a more perfect memory. In “September,” that process of recollection is not gloomy but exuberant. It’s a party for the past! Meanwhile, the background gives us a funky bassline and horns as sharp and sweet as citrus.
By contrast, “September Grass” is aching and gentle. Discovering this song at fifteen, I felt wistful for a love I had not yet experienced. Now the lyrics “we’re so small and the world’s so vast / we found each other down in the grass” bring back a sleeve of memories like stills from a disposable camera—each recollection equally tender. The line, “Oh, the memory is like the sweetest pain” describes a different longing, the full-body kind. The extremes of love and yearning blend into a single sensation, like a scalding shower that burns the skin cold.
October: “Slow Burn” by Kacey Musgraves
I remember having a conversation with my mom about how seasonal depression really ramps up for a lot of people in October, but no one sees it coming because the sky is so blue and that characteristic New England chill hasn’t yet settled. October skies really are their own thing, potent enough to burn through your eyelids and make you forget about seasonal affect or just about anything. “Slow Burn” feels like an October sky, not just because of the album cover—it’s also the unhurried guitar and the melancholy way Kacey holds onto the high notes. The lyrics are golden, too: “Born in a hurry, always late / Haven’t been early since ’88” is funny, real, and casually confessional. “Good in a glass, good on green / Good when you’re putting your hands all over me” is sexy as hell. In October, it’s tempting to harden yourself preemptively for a long winter, but Kacey chooses something different—contentment, and a soft smile.
November: “November” by Tyler the Creator
I don’t love November, I think it’s gray and cold and unremarkable. But Tyler the Creator disagrees with me, and in this song, November becomes a symbol for something golden: “Tell me, what’s your November? Is it a person? / Mine was the Summer ’06, I remember the…” And then there’s the thin harmony of sound bites from interviews, an ethnography of Novembers: “2014, Miami 43rd Street, every day was November,” one person says. My November doesn’t happen in November at all, but I think the logic behind this song is wacky and poetic, and I like the way the opening chords shimmer.
December: “December, 1963 (Oh What a Night!)” by Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons
Every year should end with a dance party, and this song is both soundtrack for and description of that sacred event. A good party has its own brand of magic: joy rolling off your body, the “sweet surrender” to the rhythm of a room of mostly strangers. It’s cliché, but my favorite lines from “December 1963” are “you know, I didn’t even know her name / but I was never gonna be the same,” because that’s how it happens, right? We’re changing every minute in ways we may not be able to identify until decades later, if ever. The most pivotal pieces of wisdom, the times where truth nestles nearby for just a minute, don’t arrive in a library, or a church, or when we turn a certain age, but during a week of terrible weather or in the middle of a song when your mind goes quiet. December resolution: look for truth in stupid places, hold on ‘til the new year.
