Pandemic Playlist: Homesick

This week’s pandemic playlist wallows in the complexity of the present moment.

This week, I tried something a little different. I assembled a sequential playlist, which is something I rarely do, given my strong shuffle instincts. Usually, I like being caught off guard by whatever song comes next, but lately, I've been feeling the need for a story arc. This week's playlist, titled “Homesick”, dwells in the complexity of the current moment instead of trying to escape it. Keeping with the present, this playlist features new music from Fiona Apple, HAIM (with their accidentally timely single “I Know Alone”), Khruangbin, and James Blake.

The trajectory starts with tension and ambiguity. Songs like Björk and Arca's "Losss" and Chicano Batman's "Polymetronomic Harmony" wrestle with the complex emotions that speak to the current moment, teetering between the many contradictions of figuring out how to exist right now: hope and hopelessness, durability and vulnerability, temporality and eternity.

Then, day turns to night. The mood cools and mellows into a sleepy state with Soccer Mommy’s dreamy “night swimming” and the sedative Tennis’ “Island Music," until finally reaching a waking state of renewed clarity. It's a bit too on the nose, but Kali Uchis and Tyler the Creator's "After the Storm" offers the perfect resolution.

I picked an unorthodox, after-the-fact ending: the Beatles’ “Los Paranoias,” one of the many forgotten, improvised studio jams that appeared on the 50th anniversary reissue of the White Album, along with other unreleased tracks and demos. It has nothing to do with anything else. It’s what Lennon would have called a “throw-away” track, something we probably weren’t ever supposed to hear that might as well have been trashed long ago. But it’s wacky and playful and completely off-the-cuff, and I like it as a cheeky ending for that reason. It's the comic relief I needed.