Earlier this month, I finally bought Spotify Premium.
As someone who listens to music every day, this was a well-overdue purchase. Not to offer Spotify free advertisement, but Premium has made finding new music, crafting playlists and sharing music digitally infinitely easier.
I like creating themes around songs in playlist form. As an avid music listener, it's convenient to have playlists for any given situation.
Whether downloading music off blogs, YouTube streaming, buying and synching CDs, vinyl, whatever; I've always put it all on my iTunes and made playlists for myself, my friends, my girlfriend, whoever.
And I’m pretty good at it.
So here are three of my favorite personal Spotify playlists I've created since making the transition from iTunes to Spotify Premium.
** Playlist links attached below each descrpition
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Life
These songs are all VERY different musically. Folk, instrumental, electronica, classical, alternative rock, classic rock, etc.
No face-value musical theme places these songs together … but these songs — at least for me — all express what it means to live. To feel time pass. To experience great change.
I may be biased because a lot of these songs are also some of my all time favorites — songs that bring me back to certain times in my life, bands that I'll always have a soft spot for. But putting my bias aside, I think these songs, in lyric, melody and instrumentation all have a reflective nature to them.
Try it out. Turn off your cell phone, close your door, and absorb.
Hipsters Go Surfing
What is a hipster? A pretentious, skinny, tree-hugger living in Brooklyn, who ONLY listens to vinyl, eats organic food, votes libertarian and wears ironic clothing. Maybe…
But for me, a hipster is really less of an actual person, and more of an overly used term for what it means to be annoyingly trendy.
I use this word here because these songs — although fall under several categories — all fit the independent, trendy mold and are tied to hipster-esque sub-genres — dream pop, shoe gaze, noise pop, garage rock, lo-fi, etc.
But mostly I just think it’s funny to imagine ... You know, a surfing hipster.
Now these hipsters are surfing because these pretentious sub-genres I don’t really like using, are all considered by some fan, blogger or music critic, as indie surf rock, or at least, beach-oriented indie music.
And with the hazy vocals, summery lyrics, lo-fi production, and 60s beach-rock reminiscent guitar on a lot of these tracks, you'll see why.
Campfire
I got this idea from a tradition that developed among my brother, my dad and I.
Every Thanksgiving and Christmas break, for the past three years now, we've sat by the fire pit, late at night, in our tiny, D.C. suburban backyard.
It’s always a blast. We usually just chat about random things like how disappointing the remakes of Star Wars were. Or why Louis C.K. is the greatest comedian of our time.
But we also play this game where we all pass around my laptop and play songs.
And just about every time, we almost exclusively play acoustic folk tunes, all with an earthy, camp-out feel.
Justin Vernon type songs — that sound as if they were recorded in a cabin somewhere in Medford, Wisconsin (As his first record consequently was).
