In the age of unlimited music streaming, discoverability is key, syncs are critical and algorithms revive forgotten tracks in ways that nobody could have foreseen.
I still discover a lot of music via conventional sources: radio, prestige dramas, Top of the Pops reruns and chill streams. But mostly I prefer my playlist to resemble a drystone wall: a stack of odd shapes from random locations, with no fixing agent.
It’s not that I’m sceptical about the algorithmic recommendations, or that I worry about Big Tech mapping my desires (although I’m not wild about that). I just can’t take any pleasure in that process.
I want to feel my hand on the tiller. But more than that, I want the freedom to discover songs in weird alcoves. That way, there’s always a story attached to the music, even if it’s inconsequential .
These are the strangest places that I’ve collected songs this year.
You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To – Nina Simone
Collection Point: A passage in Motel Chronicles by Sam Shepard in which the author describes bringing ice to Nina Simone while working as a waiter, and later becoming so distracted by her transcendent rendition of this song that he spills candle wax on a patron and gets himself fired.
Point of No Return – Nu Shooz
Collection Point: A fairground sound system that was playing frothy new-wave tunes a few metres away from a rollercoaster, as if we patrons were inhabiting the movie Adventureland. Which would be pretty sweet, actually.
Glycerine – Bush
Collection point: Revisiting a 2015 Penny Arcade comic, in which the protagonists exhume an old CD-R during an internet outage and discover that Bush’s 1995 hit is the only mp3 burned to the disc.
Lady of Spain – Eddie Fisher
Collection Point: A Peanuts strip from November 27, 1992 in which Snoopy, busking while dressed as Santa Claus, plays the song on the accordion. Linus and Lucy walk past and the latter remarks that the song “just doesn’t sound very Christmassy”.
Spiderwebs – No Doubt
Collection point: A January 2006 profile of controversial Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries, which mentions the song being played at high volume in a Hollister branch that he was visiting.
You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You) – The Notorious BIG
Collection Point: A turn-of-the-century Newsweek article titled ‘Will We Ever Get Over Irony?’ in which the writer notes that Biggie’s song “prefaces a violent specimen of gangsta rap with the Twenty-third Psalm” adding that “one of these elements is clearly out of place, yet there they both are, each endlessly recontextualizing the other – in more or less the way tennis racquets recontextualize a tennis ball.”
A Days Wait – Altered Images
Collection Point: A promotional poster magazine for the band’s sophomore album Pinky Blue that included a full discography, discovered in a box of old university wall art abandoned during a recent house move.
Clouds Across the Moon – The Rah Band
Collection point: A beachfront Mezze Bar in Kefalonia. Presumably from a playlist of songs about (or literally performed as) telephone calls, given that they also played ‘Sylvia’s Mother’ by Dr Hook.
Jennifer Eccles – The Hollies
Collection Point: A 1992 letter from a school friend, in which he recorded contemporaneously that this song was playing on his parents’ kitchen radio and mis-transcribed the refrain as ‘I love Jennifer Echoes’. There was a gap of nearly 30 years between the delivery of the letter and my search for the song.
Relative Ways – …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead
Collection Point: Recalling a friend’s disappointment after he played this single on a car stereo in 2001. He had been under the impression that the CD case contained his copy of Maggot Brain by Funkadelic. He was the designated driver for an 80-mile roundtrip to Kansas City, for a U2 gig that he was unenthusiastic about attending. The Funkadelic CD was back in the stereo our apartment.
Heartaches by the Number – Guy Mitchell
Collection Point: A spit-and-sawdust pub in Margate, where my wife sang along because it was a song that her mother often sings to herself
The East River – Jeffrey Lewis
Collection Point: A February 2009 episode of The Adam & Joe Show on BBC Radio 6 Music, in which Adam Buxton’s song selection cannot be played for a protracted period of time because the file hasn’t been cached and the CD is unavailable.
Meltin’s Worm – The Boo Radleys
Collection Point: Recollection of a feature sidebar in a 1996 issue of Select magazine, in which children were canvassed on their opinion on C’Mon Kids, the latest album from The Boo Radleys. This track received an enthusiastic response from a young listener.
Shake You Down – Gregory Abbott
Collection point: A smartphone speaker, shared by a blissfully relaxed middle-aged couple reclining together on a bench in a local rock garden, as the last rays of September evening sun illuminated the leaves of the cherry tree behind them.
