Pandemic Playlist
A song-a-day got us through 474 days of isolation
Throughout my life, music has provided a soundtrack that marked the time.
When “China Grove“ plays, I’m driving my red Olds Omega back through the small Indiana highways on my way back home from college, the windows down and feeling unstoppable. If I hear “Summer Days”, it becomes 3a in a basement office trying to catch up on coding work for TicketsNow, or doing stats for a custom league on WhatIfSports. With “Big Man on Mulberry Street” I can see Bruce Willis dancing with Cybil Sheppard while I longed for love.
What are you listening to?
When the COVID pandemic hit in mid March of 2020, all my kids were again under the same roof, in a house just a little too small to hold us all. It turned out to be a blessing for us, as we had regular movie nights and played games, reconnecting in a way we might not have been inclined to do had we not been trapped in the same space for months on end.
There was also a lot of eclectic music filling our spaces, mixing and matching our tastes with what each of us liked.
It was with these new-to-me songs playing on the Sonos that I leaned into social media to reconnect with high school friends, partly in honor of one I had lost about a year before. I don’t remember exactly how it began, but our Facebook group became a space for suggesting music that described our experiences in lockdown. We were several dozen deep into the list by the time I migrated them all to Apple Music and then Spotify.
The pandemic group petered out after a few months, but by then I was already in a rhythm. I explored Spotify’s custom playlists each week to find new music that fulfilled the brief, to put some pep in my step or comfort my soul. The search for a song became a daily practice that included finding a matching YouTube video to build a playlist there, too. Though sometimes a chore, selecting a song of the day to share also filled me with some joy that fueled whatever came next.
By the start of summer the following year, COVID vaccinations were available, and the family started going through the two-shot sequence. The disease was far from resolved, of course, but at the time it felt like a milestone had been reached, and if I didn’t stop collecting music for this purpose, I never would. When the final kid had cleared the quarantine window, I concluded the playlist with “4’ 33””, a concept art piece that was built for reflection.
It’s a Vibe
That curation resulted in 31 hours and 18 minutes of music selected to either tell the story of COVID isolation or just pick up spirits and spark some energy to get through it. A playlist that length isn’t meant to be heard in one sitting. It is more of a way to tap into a vibe for a while, whether enduring a rough day at the office or a long drive through construction and pre-game traffic.
Every song on the list either connects me with the friend who suggested it—including some no longer with us—or gets my heart pumping with some kind of positive feeling. As with most meaningful songs in my life, I can also re-experience the discovery of these songs and return to a positive moment that helped get me through a challenging time.
The endcap for the list contains no notes. The final piece is art by John Cage that questions what music is by having the audience focus on the ambient sounds of a performance space in the absence of traditional instruments.
When it shows up in the shuffled playlist, the silence throws me.
It always takes me several beats to realize the music has stopped but the playlist is still going. If I am able to recognize it quickly enough, the car will suddenly crescendo with the sound of the road, the car fan, and the breathing of the passengers sharing that space with me. The next song, whatever it is, always sounds more powerful than I have ever heard it before.
A form of this post was originally Delight #020 when I was posting them directly on Facebook, whose recent policy changes make it a less inviting community than it was a couple decades ago. I still use Twitter and Facebook, even if billionaires have insisted on new names and culture, but this is where my writing now lives.