In the midwest, spring is a long process. In memory, it feels like the trees used to bud earlier into the year, like flowers were surfacing by the time we reached Easter candy stocked in the grocery stores. In reality, this is nowhere near the case. Famous Minnesotan Prince noted “sometimes it snows in April,” and, well, yeah, we’re reminded of this every year. The secret is: I don’t mind it at all. The longer the season drags itself through its adolescent mood swings – the bouts of gusty winds, rain, sudden 75 degree days, frosts – the more I get to indulge in mid-weight jacket season — and I need to justify that closet assortment more than you even know. Besides, I get wary when the temperature ascends and drops, I have visions of tornados, know the heat always has a storm on either end of it, feel the migraines and body aches of shifting pressure systems, the exhaustion of hyper-sudden explosions of the allergen load.
Still, there is something triggered as the days get longer and the car windows can be – here and there – incrementally rolled down. Specifically, for me, it’s a shift in my listening habits. Even more specifically, for me, it’s a return to the curation of a playlist I’ve kept a variation on since basically the dawn of the iTunes library: the Endless Summer.
When I say “playlist” for this particular collection, I feel like some might be inclined to argue the definition of the term. Endless Summer is almost never under 500 songs, has no playback order, no structure, and bleeds across genres in a way that makes it more of either an archive or a freeform radio station. It’s a list designed to always be on shuffle, where the experience is a little different each time and you may never reach the end before the tracks have – potentially – changed.
As I write this, the current Endless Summer list has 526 songs collected within its borders. Further down – private in my Spotify settings – is a “Holding Pattern” playlist with tracks that have been shifted out of the Endless Summer rotation, with another 400 or so songs I’ve become sick of hearing in the shuffle, or which feel a little tired, or which, perhaps, are just of a moment that might kill a vibe now (sorry, Drake, but that’s you). Along the way there are exceptions that may surprise, because the goal of these lists is to dodge – to some degree – the obvious and, instead, curate sounds that resonate better in sunshine and heat. To make it on the Endless Summer playlist, I have to be able to imagine the track accompanying poolside rosé – in the NPR, rosé-wave sense – or a roadtrip with the windows down, drinks with friends on a restaurant patio, or a hazy, half-baked morning in Laurel Canyon. These are not the same, no, and the guiding principle is one dictated by sonic aspects I’m barely capable of properly articulating:
Dub, for example, is a given, as there’s a built in echo like the sound is trapped in humidity, as its language is the language of bass transmitted on the wind. Certain configurations of instrumentation built from countries associated with hot weather, too, tend to make the cut. Nigerian jazz and disco are sort of a given, or Indian singer Rupa Biswas’s “Disco Jazz” cuts through nicely. The sound of summer alternates between full, reverberating bass and something tinny on the breeze. It can be chill, built with indie-sleaze marimbas or the early aughts twinkling, downtempo soundscapes of forgotten Hotel Costes compilations. It can, of course, also be Vietnam War-era protest rock – the sound of young people congregating in streets, of flower children. And, yes, pop is always an assumption – compressed drums that sound like the snap when you open a sweating can of Coca Cola.
All of this, though, without defaulting to previous “songs of the summer” or even necessarily embracing the Top 40 of the current year. For example, as much as I love her, you probably won’t find Charli XCX’s Brat on Endless Summer, because the sounds, actually, don’t meet the abstract, intuitive seasonal criteria. They’re too angular, crash too abruptly against other songs. You will, however, find “Espresso,” because the vibe is correct: it’s sunbaked, the colors are too bright, the instrumentals feel like something overheard walking through crowds on a beach in Instagram-filtered Clarendon.
Does it all make sense? I don’t know. Endless Summer is a feeling, an intuitive process of feeling something out. The songs have to sit right, and even I mess it up sometimes – realizing in the middle of driving someplace that I have to axe something recently added because it just doesn’t work. More than a feeling, though, it’s a quiet obsession, something I tinker with even more endlessly than its total run time, and which creates an incidental record of each successive year. Anyway, here it is:
love + squalor 