Playlist Log: solitary summer

I spent a lot of summers listening to deeply depressing music by Sufjan Stevens, Frank Ocean, and The Antlers, among others. For the brightest months of the year, I would be buried under a cloud of sad. Eventually, I graduated high school, and started to find more joy in my summers (I made some friends!). Classic summer music suddenly was more appealing than ever, and I got into the habit of making summer playlists to announce my love of the sound. Each summer holds strong associations with the songs that I discovered around that time (summer 16 does indeed hit different).

This summer is pretty unlike any other summer, so I gave this summer playlist a little bit of a twist. I’ve included a lot of great standard summer sounding bops (“Sunday Best” and “Chicken Tenders”) and sounds to bounce your head to (“Purple Hat” and “Let it Be”), but I also wanted to add some room for reflection. As the title of the playlist suggests, we’re spending a lot of time alone indoors, so I added tracks to reflect this new type of solitude through some AMAZING ambient music (Hiroshi Yoshimura tracks), slower electronic tracks (“Carbon Dream” and “Acres”), lowkey hip hop (“Long Beach” and “Gooey Rework”) and some Japanese R&B for no reason at all (“life hack” and “LOOP”).

The playlist kind of veers around quickly, but it feels apt to be this way considering what this summer has been like so far. You’re having a good time with your roommates one second, then you’re all alone introspecting deeply, then you’re just trying to find the space to breathe. Each day has been it’s own gamble of emotions, and each track could feel any way. But hopefully the playlist does that in a calmer, less overwhelmingly terrifying way.

Hope you like it.