March is here, and outside the rain is falling, I can hear the drip-drip-drip on the windows as I sit in the kitchen listening to my Top 5 Music Obsessions of the day. They say it never rains in Southern California, but “they” say a lot. Don’t believe everything you hear.
Today’s Top 5 Mix of songs starts with The Cure. A band that I have been known for always including on a mixtape “back in the day”, and am still known to throw into playlists more than often. “Plainsong” has always been a favorite song of mine, the first track off of my favorite Cure-album (Disintegration). I’m really digging (obsessively digging) this newish mix. Also, the first lyrical line is about rain, so it seems pretty apropos.
I’m feeling nostalgic today, missing parts of my younger self, but also grateful to have lived through some of my younger times. I am meditating on the things that made younger me happier, braver, and more optimistic. I’ve lost so much of myself in the last two years, but I am slowly rebuilding. I am slowly getting stronger and braver, and I am trying very hard to be optimistic again. I want to be happy again.
Next up in today’s Top 5 is another opening track from another favorite album of mine. “Know Who You Are At Every Age” by the Cocteau Twins, off of their album Four-Calendar Cafe seems a perfect song to start off my birthday month with. As I gaze back and look forward, I want to remember to stay present, to know who I am today. To know what it is I really want. Why is it so hard to know ourselves?
Number three with a raindrop (I’m not fond of bullets) is a new track by Phoebe Bridgers that I’m very obsessed with. Phoebe is a newish obsession of mine. I love her voice and her songwriting, and I love her new song “Garden Song”.
“Starlings” is another track one in the mix. I didn’t realize I was collecting up so many opening songs in these Top 5. This song is so beautiful. It is a take my breath kind of beautiful that I can’t seem to get enough of today. I love Guy Garvey’s voice.
The last of the Top 5 today is a song that makes me cry. Sufjan Stevens “Should Have Known Better”. It feels so relatable to my life, but maybe I’m personalizing it too much today. I’m trying to be good right now, happy, but I’m not. Melancholy and anxiety are knitting their fingers together, holding hands and pulling me down, but I’m taking the deepest breaths I can, I’m summoning all my strength, and I’m trying to fight back. I want this month to be better. I need it to be.
Music helps. It always helps.
Top 5 Music Obsessions – March 1, 2020
Follow along for the month of March on Spotify and YouTube
1. “Plainsong (Edge of the World Mix 2018) by The Cure
from the album, Mixed Up (Deluxe Edition) (2018)
“I think it’s dark and it looks like it’s rain, you said.
And the wind is blowing like it’s the end of the world, you said.
And it’s so cold,
it’s like the cold if you were dead –
and you smiled for a second.”
2. “Know Who You Are At Every Age” by Cocteau Twins
from the album, Four-Calendar Cafe (1993)
“I’m not real and I deny,
I won’t heal unless I cry.
I can’t grieve,
so I won’t grow.
I won’t heal ’til I let it go.”
3. “Garden Song” by Phoebe Bridgers
Single (2020)
“And when I grow up,
I’m gonna look up,
from my phone and see my life,
and it’s gonna be just like my recurring dream.
I’m at the movies,
I don’t remember what I’m seeing.
The screen turns into a tidal wave.
Then it’s a dorm room,
like a hedge maze.,
And when I find you
you touch my leg and I insist,
but I wake up before we do it”
4. “Starlings” by Elbow
from the album, The Seldom Seen Kid (2009)
“You are the only thing,
in any room you’re ever in.”
5. “Should Have Known Better” by Sufjan Stevens
from the album, Carrie & Lowell (2015)
“I should have known better.
Nothing can be changed.
The past is still the past.
The bridge to nowhere.
I should have wrote a letter,
explaining what I feel,
that empty feeling.”
Top 5 Music Obsessions – March 2020
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4SgpSYmxcWe2kwl8mkVZkn?si=kmQl9OjwQAKmP12SPYWHqQ
