Music Monday: Summer 2023 Playlist

Happy Music Monday! It’s once again time for a playlist!

As I mentioned in my last playlist article back in May, this year I’m splitting my normal massive End-of-Summer Playlist into two smaller ones, with this one roughly covering music I found from May through September… except as I’ve said in the past, I’m also not very timely when it comes to new music anyway, so I guess it’s a little debatable how much those timeframes matter to anyone else. Ah well. I’m also doing my usual write-ups, except I felt less wordy this time, so it probably won’t be as long (although last time was also a little extreme in length, so maybe that’s for the best).

Here are the YouTube and Spotify playlists:






The notes on what’s missing: Mouse removed her music from Spotify, so that’s only on the YouTube playlist. I couldn’t find “Strange Luvv” by King Isis on either platform, so here’s a Bandcamp link. And 7mai doesn’t use either, so here’s a link to their Bandcamp page; the picks on this playlist come from the Gray, Pink, Yellow, and Violet “Colorful Palette” EPs.

And speaking of, as always, a lot of these artists have Bandcamp pages where you can purchase their music directly. So if there’s something that you really like, maybe consider throwing some money their way as well!

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Carly Rae Jepsen, The Loveliest Time

Once again, Carly Rae Jepsen followed up an album release with a B-sides collection the following year. I don’t really have a ton to say here; Carly Rae Jepsen released an album of very good pop music? And I liked it a lot? Wow, what a shock, who could have guessed any of this!

It is kind of interesting that this one dropped the “B-Sides” label this time in exchange for its own (derivative) name, although it’s also probably the B-Side album that feels like it most strongly stands on its own, so it makes sense. It does feel like The Loveliest Time dabbles around in styles more than any of her other albums. I wish it had a song I liked as much as “Run Away With Me” or “The Loneliest Time” or “Want You In My Room”, but it’s also not hard to recommend songs like “Shy Boy” and “Psychedelic Switch”. Overall, I’m not sure if it’s my favorite of CRJ’s projects, but that’s a difficult catalog to stand out in, and probably partly personal taste.


PRIZM, All Night

This one was my big, new discovery while browsing Bandcamp over the last few months. I know that I have a thing for those sparkling atmospheric synths and haunting saxes and powerful vocals singing big hooks cutting through it all… but also, this Dallas-based duo makes it so easy to love it. They have the style down pat, writing banger after banger and polishing them to a gem-like gleam, and splashing them across the night sky with a sense of cinematic grandeur. The songs I’ve picked for the list (“All Night”, “Lost You”, and “Can’t Bring Me Down”) were all easy calls, instant classics that I immediately fell in love with, but really, there are no weak links on All Night. I tore through the rest of their releases and can recommend it all, although for the sake of this playlist, I included “Sober” (one of three recent singles, hopefully prelude to a new album?) and cover “Don’t Stop” (one of a trio of Fleetwood Mac covers they released; I like them all, but felt like this one was the most interesting, really putting a unique spin all their own on it).

Music Monday: End of 2022 Playlist

2023 Has finally arrived, but before we get too far along into the new year, I’d like to close out 2022 with some music. That’s right, it’s time for my third annual End of the Year Playlist and accompanying article! I’ve had a fun time finding new music and writing about it the last few months, and honestly, this size feels much more manageable for what I’m trying to do with this series. I might even split my normal Summer Playlist into two smaller ones since it’s been getting more and more unwieldy, we’ll see.

Once again, I’ve assembled the playlist in both Youtube and Spotify so that you can follow along.





Notes: The YouTube playlist is more complete than the Spotify one, missing 5 songs to 13. Of those five, “Under the Sun” and “Milk & Moon” can be found on full albums on YouTube. I couldn’t find much of 7mai on either service, so here are Soundcloud links to the full EP releases of the two songs of theirs that I reference: “Strawberry Mousse”, “Celestial”. The only place that I can find “Spring Cleaning” is on Sir Babygirl’s Bandcamp page.


With all of that out of the way, onto the article:

My Favorite Albums of the Playlist:

-St. Lucia
St. Lucia dropped a lot of their new album, Utopia, early as pre-release singles in the run-up to the full release, and I’m always a little mixed about that strategy. I understand that constantly dripping out new material is a good way to stay at the forefront of people’s minds, which is becoming increasingly important in music. But it does feel like it can sometimes dull the impact of the full album; finding new surprises to enjoy on your first or second listen of a full record is one of the things that I like most, and knowing most of the songs early undercuts it.

But it didn’t seem to matter here, thankfully. On the one hand, Utopia is great, and no amount of pre-release familiarity was going to dull its impact. I still stand by “Touch” being maybe my favorite track of theirs (which I said when it made my last playlist article), and it’s backed up by a ton of other strong tracks, like “Take Me Away”, “Another Lifetime”, “Rockets on My Feet”, and so on. Few other artists have as good an ear for big soundscapes and ringing, triumphant choruses that you can shout along to, in my opinion.

But on the other hand… maybe it’s just too good of an album for surprise to totally wear it down? The group has a strong track record, and I love all four of their albums. But maybe I’d be saying Utopia easily stands above the others if I heard it mostly at once with only one or two singles, as I did their first three (When the Night, Matter, and Hyperion). I guess all I can do at this point is keep re-listening over time and see if my opinion on it grows as much over time as it has for the others.


-Fickle Friends
Every now and again, maybe once or twice a year, I’ll stumble upon a new album from an artist that I haven’t heard of or don’t really follow, and fall in love with it, leading me to go back through their older work and discover that 1) there’s a decent amount of stuff to listen to, and 2) I love it as well. At that point, I just end up kind of stuck on that artist for a few weeks, maybe trying some other stuff but always circling back to them. And that is why there’s so much Fickle Friends on my End of 2022 Playlist.

I saw their new album from earlier in 2022, Are We Gonna Be Alright?, while browsing for something I hadn’t heard before, and immediately latched on. It wound up being one of my favorite albums of the year, just 40 minutes and a dozen songs of tight, bouncy, catchy synthpop. I had it on loop for days, dancing and singing along to songs like “Glow”, “Pretty Great”, “IRL”, “Love You to Death”... there something about it that all works perfectly, the hooks are so memorable and tight, and the lyrics stick in my mind simply capturing moments of love and relationships and loneliness.

And from there, I went back through their back-catalog. Their debut album You Are Someone Else was a little less polished, but still displayed all of their talent beautifully. Their two Weird Years EPs served as a perfect pandemic-era bridge between the two. All of the B-sides and early EPs were similarly fun, all the way back to their first one in 2014. I can’t believe I missed them for this long, they really are straight up my alley! And I spent a lot of the end of 2022 just getting caught up on them, so they end up making a lot of this playlist.

In the past, I’ve tried to limit my picks from a single artist somewhat, but… these lists are at least partly for me to revisit, too, so I’d like it to reflect what I was listening to at the time. And I honestly was just listening to Fickle Friends for a while this year!


-Carly Rae Jepsen
I was a little worried about The Loneliest Time; following up two absolute classic albums like Emotion and Dedicated seems like it would be a tall order. Thankfully, The Loneliest Time lived up to it; it helps that it moved into its own sort of territory, separate from those two albums, lower key while still somehow full of big, emotional moments. But like those two, it's just a bunch of top-notch bangers throughout, with a few 11/10 songs (“Shooting Star” and the title track duet with Rufus Wainwright) highlighting the experience. And now, we can once again return to anxiously awaiting the arrival of The Loneliest Time B Sides.

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Music Monday: Summer 2020 Playlist

It's been a while since my last playlist, but as I mentioned recently, there's been a lot of good music released lately, so I feel like this would be a good time for a comeback. Not everything on it technically came out this year since I can't listen to everything the exact moment it comes out (although I did keep it entirely to at least "modern" acts), but it is at least all stuff that I've been listening to over the spring and summer, and this is as much a time capsule for me to look back on as anything else, so it makes the cut. I've also included a few thoughts about some of the songs included below.

[Spotify Link]

The New American Song Book and the Pop Music Canon

Slate ran a fun piece last week looking at what they termed “The New American Songbook”, or the pop hits (some from non-American acts, despite the name) of the last 25 years that will be listened to long into the future. The full balloting can be found here, while this piece covers the top thirty songs (which basically wound up being anything that got more than one vote from their 19 panelists).

I wanted to weigh in on it because, let’s face it, this is right up my alley. A panel of experts weighing in on the best, most memorable entries in one of my hobbies from the past twenty-five years? I basically write a dozen articles each year on the baseball version of that.

I wanted to write a few thoughts on the balloting and maybe provide my own nominations.


1. The list is generally pretty solid.
Nothing there seems totally out of place. I don’t know if it’s necessarily in the order from “most likely” to “least likely” (just for starters, “Let It Go” is probably too low at 30, given that it has a recent popular movie for young children and the full force of Disney behind it), and there are certainly songs that I thought deserved more votes (I’m still a little shocked “Mr. Brightside” was only named three times and landed at the middle of the list). There are things missing, but any list of just twenty-five songs is going to be missing a lot. Also, “Hey Ya” seems like a strong number one, so it’s hard to quibble too much with the system.

2. Twenty-five years was probably too long of a window to use.

Music Monday: Getaway Car Playlist (Inspired by Baby Driver)

Edgar Wright might be my favorite director of all-time. Naturally, I was super excited when I found out that he had another movie coming out this summer, but even more exciting was finding out that it was going to be a musical about car chases.* Sure enough, Baby Driver lived up to all my expectations when I saw it earlier this summer.

*A lot of the initial weirdness one assumes when hearing this conversation dissipates once you remember that The Blues Brothers exists. Apparently, this is a much more natural combination than it first seems.
I wanted to write something about the movie, but I never quite got a better idea than just a page of me just cycling through all of the synonyms for “really cool” that I know. So I finally decided that maybe the best thing to do would be respond to it.


Most of the film’s soundtrack caught me off guard, in a way. For those who haven’t seen it, the main character, “Baby”, is a getaway car driver who is obsessed with music, and needs to sync up his drives with carefully-selected songs. It’s a neat conceit, and I loved it. But thinking back to the movie afterwards (as well as looking over the soundtrack), I sort of had an epiphany: my idea of songs I would use in his place was totally different.

I mean, I had never really thought too hard about what made something a good “getaway car song” before Baby Driver, but my first clue was how little of the soundtrack was something I personally would have picked. Not that any of it is bad; it’s mostly just a matter of taste and frame of reference, if anything. But outside of maybe “Radar Love”, my hypothetical list would have little overlap.

So I put more thought into it: what would my “Getaway Car” Playlist look like? After thinking it over for a while, this is the result. It’s not one of my normal playlists, in that there isn’t really a flow or an “order” to this, and I didn’t spend hours honing the song-to-song transitions; by nature, it’s supposed to be a little stop and start, something you can listen to on shuffle (because, you know, a car chase probably shouldn’t last long).

I’m pretty happy with the end result. Despite not being one of my original “themes” or ideas, I think I put my own distinct spin on the subject. A full text list can be found below as well.


Run with the Bulls-Smallpools
Sins of My Youth-Neon Trees
Stolen Time-Gemini Club
Started a War-Gemini Club
Sex-The 1975
Let’s Make a Lot of Money-Junior Prom
Dance, Dance-Fall Out Boy
Kill V. Maim-Grimes
Next to You-The Police
I Will Follow-U2
Got to Get You Into My Life-Earth, Wind, & Fire
You Dropped a Bomb on Me-The Gap Band
Mirrored Sea-Passion Pit
Something’s Bout to Change-Strange Talk
You Will Leave a Mark-A Silent Film
Atlas-COIN
I Love You to Death-Five Knives
North American Scum-LCD Soundsystem
Leave the Lights On-Mainland
Hello-Oasis
I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor-Arctic Monkeys
Turn It On-Franz Ferdinand
Hang Me Up to Dry-Cold War Kids
All of This-The Naked and Famous
Let It Go-Dragonette
Help Me Run Away-St. Lucia
Paddling Out-Miike Snow
Drive It Like You Stole It-Sing Street
Witchcraft-Pendulum
Bounce-Calvin Harris ft. Kelis
My Type-Saint Motel
Try to Lose-Penguin Prison
Making the Most of the Night-Carly Rae Jepsen
Mr. Brightside-The Killers

Summer Playlist 2017

June 7th marks the third anniversary of Out of Left Field, and I struggled to think of something that would mark the occasion as well as my Hot Corner Harbor seventh anniversary post the other day. In the end, I decided to instead go back to a feature that I’ve critically underutilized so far, playlists. I love sharing music, after all. The amazingly nice weather recently had me thinking about summer songs again, so I decided why not try and build off of last year’s post and do a new Summer Playlist for 2017.

It’s not going to be exactly, the same of course. I made sure to stick to stuff not on either of my earlier playlists* (even though I was really tempted to feature “Weekend” by Neon Trees again, it’s really perfect for this, and Scavenger Hunt got crowded out partly because of two features on last year’s list). And it wound up being a little less thematically laser-focused, meaning a larger list with sometime more abstract connections to the summer theme. Some of them feel more like “good songs to listen to during summer” rather than “summer songs”, but I can’t really explain in words what that difference is exactly, other than it’s an instinctual feeling. Just know that it occurred to me during my brainstorming and bugged me a little.

*Or upcoming playlists, in a few cases; I have several more in the works, maybe I’ll eventually get around to posting them.


 A few blurbs on the songs now:

Music Monday: Pick-Me-Up Playlist

I wanted to try something different for this Music Monday. I’ve been wanting to write about music for a while, but no song has inspired me enough to write a could hundred words on it. In any case, it was kind of a gray, cold, rainy, and all-around miserable weekend, and I needed something to cheer me up, so I started listening to some music to perk up my mood. I just kept going with songs until I decided to just make a playlist and share it, with some words about that. Maybe by just chipping in a few words about each one, I’ll feel more inspired. Either way, it’ll let me share music I love, which is always a plus.