The sexiest Nine Inch Nails songs

Flying to NYC

This is how to pass the time when you are swooping over the Atlantic for a date with Bruce Springsteen. I like fonts.

Jukebox babe mix 1

Don't tell my mom

Songs for a Bristol road-trip on a sunny October morning. The kind of journey you don't forget in a hurry.

'All the way along the motorway large sweeps of birds gathered themselves above the trees for their long journey someplace warm.'

'It was sunny now and the motorway looked beautiful, cutting across wide fields under a blue sky. It was my turn to play music. I knew if there was something I could do well, even if I wasn’t a good talker, it was to make a good playlist.'

'I thought about that Rob Sheffield quote. "There is nowhere else I could imagine wanting to be besides here in this car, with this girl, on this road, listening to this song. If she breaks my heart, no matter what hell she puts me through, I can say it was worth it, just because of right now. Out the window is a blur and all I can really hear is this girl’s hair flapping in the wind, and maybe if we drive fast enough the universe will lose track of us and forget to stick us somewhere else."'

Bury me deep in love

Songs for leaving Berkeley

Half-made, on a napkin during a coffee shop shift, in those final flurried days.

Twelve miler: songs

How to make a twelve mile run around snowy Baltimore a little more bearable...

A mix for unrequited lovers

Disclaimer: I'm not suffering from unrequited love. The other day though, I had reading and work to do, and thus a form of procrastination was required. I felt like making a mix but I had no inspiration for a theme or concept, no grand life event (like moving countries) to occasion. I went for a run. One of the songs that came on shuffle was Robyn's Dancing On My Own, a pop song whose greatness I'll always defend. Immediately following came Future Islands' excellent I'll-still-be-listening-to-this-when-I'm-forty Seasons (Waiting On You), and there was the spark. Unrequited love!


This mix starts and ends with wanting. Except the first kind of want, Springsteen's Dylan cover, is sweeping, twinkling, lamenting; that bittersweet thing only really good songs do, when they straddle two opposing emotions simultaneously. You're resigned to sadness, but you're kind of enjoying it. Bowie's Heroes is another song that does this, and The National's Sorrow: 'it's in my honey, it's in my milk ... I don't wanna get over you'. I always think of the 'you' here as referring to sorrow itself, as well as an actual person.


The kind of wanting this mix ends on, Brandon Flowers' Still Want You, is more hopeful. Like, 'throw as much shit as you can at me, and I'll still be here, wanting you, and I know you'll probably end up wanting me back'. It reminds me of a quote from Tove Jansson's The Summer Book:


'"It's funny about love," Sophia said. "The more you love someone, the less he likes you back."
"That's very true," Grandmother observed. "And so what do you do?"
"You go on loving," said Sophia threateningly. "You love harder and harder."'


This mix will take you on a journey between those two kinds of want; a journey of tears, rain, dancing, desperation, anger, loneliness, glowing lights, and time. Enjoy.


And if there're any glaring omissions, or you just want to share your favourite songs of unrequited love, I'm all ears.


A mix for unrequited lovers

1. I Want You (Bob Dylan cover)  /  Bruce Springsteen
2. Seasons (Waiting On You)  /  Future Islands
3. I Can't Believe It  /  The Animals
4. Release Me  /  Oh Laura
5. There's No One Crying Over Me Either  /  American Wrestlers
6. Crying  /  Roy Orbison
7. Time Moves Slow (ft. Sam Herring)  /  BADBADNOTGOOD
8. Hard To Find  /  The National
9. Dancing On My Own  /  Robyn
10. Still Want You  /  Brandon Flowers

Songs for going away for a little while

The journey to California is a dull tale involving the following: an overweight suitcase; three films (Carol, Where The Wild Things Are, Star Wars); a two-hour wait in line at Oakland airport security; a smooth, cool taxi ride; and a quiet arrival to a pillow-less bed.

But before that, there are messages and goodbyes, and a face crinkled up with tears at the train station. My parents shrink to tiny figures as the platform disappears out of view. I think of that over-quoted but irritatingly spot-on Kerouac line: 'What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.'

A few days later I am standing in a thrift store on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue listening to Amy Winehouse sing, 'He walks away / The sun goes down / He takes the day / But I'm grown / And in your way / In this blue shade / My tears dry on their own'. It's the same sentiment, right? The initial pain of leaving, and how it forces you to look ahead, muster some independence, get on with the next crazy venture. In conversations during these early days we all admit how it was hard to say goodbye, but then the moment passed and it was like, 'right, what's next?'

I will always hate goodbyes though. They might be a necessary manifestation of everything that's good in a relationship, but that doesn't make them any easier. Aged five I cried and cried over a film in which a child is forced to abandon her favourite old toys when the family move home. The toys sit alone on the kerb waiting for the rubbish lorry. I couldn't bear it. I hate that scene in Frances Ha too, when she waves goodbye to her parents in a Californian airport, waves as an escalator lifts her away from them towards a New York-bound plane.

A goodbye is a kind of loss. You lose whatever it is you are saying goodbye to; not the people, necessarily, but the part of your life they represent, a certain time and place. It's a loss of yourself, I guess. You'll never get that old version of you back. While discussing Heart of Darkness in British Literature class today, we touch briefly on the Buddhist concept of dukkha: the pain and suffering of loss, the inevitability of it, how it can never be satisfied. But maybe the pain of loss should never be satisfied, because then we'd never explore beyond it. We'd just remain trapped by it.

Anyway. All of this is just a long-winded explanation of the mix I made before I left. Songs for going away for a little while. These songs will take you from the goodbye tears, the initial feeling of loss and emptiness and a lack of love for the new venture (or maybe the feeling of being left behind), to finding your way through the lonesome day, and the energy of newness that brings: the enjoyment of and gratitude for the experience.

Or as Max puts it in Where The Wild Things Are: 'let the wild rumpus start!'

*   *   * 

Songs for going away for a little while

1. She's Gone  //  Hall & Oates
2. Long Black Veil  //  Richard Hawley
3. I Need My Girl  //  The National
4. Lonely Town  //  Brandon Flowers
5. Lady With The Braid  //  Dory Previn
6. Sloop John B  //  The Beach Boys
7. Lonesome Day (live, Glasgow 2016)  //  Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
8. Forever Wild  //  Willie Nile
9. Young Americans  //  David Bowie
10. Wagon Wheel  //  Lou Reed
11. Balance  //  Future Islands
12. Thank You  //  Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats
13. If Not For You  //  George Harrison 
14. This Hard Land  //  Bruce Springsteen

And the livin' is easy: songs for summer

June, 2016.

I made a playlist.

A month of midsummer rain, of Brexit despair, of bearded footballers, of Bruce and the best nights of my life, of elks and airports and black leather boots and frozen yoghurt, of political and social combustions, of burrowing deep into rock and roll music.

It's July now. As I type, Federer's about to be blown out of Wimbledon (update: epic comeback!). A crocodile-teared Blair has just had his own reputation blown to smithereens by Chilcot. The Corbyn 'chicken coup' continues, hopefully in vain. Leave politicians are fleeing the stinking ship of xenophobia and bigotry now that it's somehow successfully left port. Next month I move to California. The sunshine is steady again, but the ground, everywhere, feels much less so.

At least there's always music.

______

And the livin' is easy: songs for the summer:


  

Songs for a slow summer

1. It's A Beautiful Morning  /  The Rascals
2 Still Want You  /  Brandon Flowers
3. I Can Do No Wrong  /  American Wrestlers
4. Tennessee  /  Johnny Cash
5. Atlantic City [Bruce Springsteen cover]  /  The Band
6. No Surrender  /  Bruce Springsteen
7. Lonely Town  /  Brandon Flowers
8. Spectrum /  Florence and the Machine
9. Babylon  /  David Gray
10. Little Sister  /  Ry Cooder
11. Let It Feel Good (My Eagles)  /  White Denim
12. A Dream Of You And Me  /  Future Islands
13. Home  /  Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
14. Nashville Skyline Rag  /  Bob Dylan

Songs for surviving winter

1. Suffering You, Suffering Me  /  Slow Club
2. Spring  /  Ben Watt
3. Violent Shiver  /  Benjamin Booker
4. Wichita Ain't So Far Away  /  The Delines
5. Black Metal  /  Max Jury
6. You Never Can Tell  /  Chuck Berry
7. For Today I Am A Boy  /  Antony and the Johnsons
8. Truth  /  Alexander Ebert
9. Another Night  /  The Men
10. Train Song [Vashti Bunyan cover]  /  Bon Iver
11. Fake Empire  /  The National
12. Baby Blue  /  Badfinger