The Interlude

I started a playlist at the beginning of my freshman year of college called “Regular Request,” an almost 12-hour behemoth on Apple Music that’s a grab-bag of tunes. Anytime I find a song I like, I add it. I once played it while road-tripping for two hours to the Tennessee mountains with my friend. “This playlist is so chaotic,” she remarked after James Taylor transitioned into Justin Bieber.

There’s no real rhyme, reason, or rule. Adding a song to the playlist can be prompted by anything: hearing a catchy hook while shopping around Target, being mesmerized by the musical accompaniment to a dramatic scene in a movie or TV show, a recommendation from a friend, or simply a favorite artist of mine releasing new songs. Sometimes there’s a preexisting emotional connection to the song, sometimes not so much. 

I listen to this playlist whenever I’m driving, working, cleaning, writing, cooking, thinking, or really doing anything at all. Sometimes I’ll listen to a song nonstop for days on end until I inevitably grow sick of it — but not before the lyrics and melodies have woven themselves into the fabric of my memories. Other times, it might sit in the rolodex as a solid and consistent friend before fate plays it during moments of deep rumination. Every new addition represents a snapshot of my life at a certain moment in time, with specific memories of when and why I’ve played it threaded into each song. Sometimes I like to start the playlist from the very first song and stroll down the journey of the last five years — getting transported to moments and emotions I can viscerally remember with each chord and beat. It’s a testament to both the universality and individuality of music.

In Back Tracks, I’ll share a few songs attached to specific memories, emotions, and snapshots throughout my life — both the big, world-shifting ones and the quick but deeply intimate ones. If you relate to any of these, you can listen to Back Tracks on The Interlude’s Spotify. 

1. “Dancing on My Own” covered by Calum Scott (originally by Robyn): Played from my laptop in a freshman dorm during one of my first weeks in college, the door ajar in a vain attempt to make friends with the other girls in my hall. Hoping someone might pass by, double-back, poke their head in, and say, “Wow, I love your room,” to spark the kind of friendship everyone told me I’d find in college — the ones forged over 1 a.m. commiserations, stupid mistakes, and staying up way too late (you decide why). Instead, they all hustled and bustled up and down the corridor, on their way out for the night with the people they’d already dubbed their “forever friends.” I eventually closed the door for the night and cried silently on my floor with Calum’s croons as my only company, frustrated with the feeling of being friends with everyone and no one at the same time, but also not quite being sure how to change that. 

2. “Jackie and Wilson” by Hozier: Added during my freshman year of college, this is one of the first on the playlist, and consistently played in dorms, libraries, and on afternoon walks. I even sang it in the car with a guy I would stop speaking to come the next month. I didn’t let myself listen to the song for over a year after that — intentionally skipping it every time it came on shuffle, but never taking it off the playlist — until one day it came on while I was driving home from the grocery store. I paused, my thumb hovering over the “next” button, before making the radical decision not to deny myself a song I’d loved long before I knew him. As I crested the hill to get home, I sang along at the top of my lungs, this time without him, and felt just a bit lighter. 

3. “Baby” by Justin Bieber: I said what I said. Added entirely unironically sometime during my sophomore year of college — nearly eight years after it originally came out — to jam to when taking the long way home or driving with friends to a cheap spring break vacation in Orange Beach, Ala. Hearing this song elicits an almost Pavlovian response, the lyrics unwittingly committed to memory during school dances and Bar Mitzvahs. The moment the definitive synth strikes through my speakers, I’m bombarded by all my suppressed middle school memories of “dating” a boy (read: texting until 11 p.m.) for the first time, side-swept bangs and overly-fried hair victim to a cheap straightener. The song is the epitome of cringe. But there’s also no denying the endearing layers of early adolescent innocence masquerading as “maturity” in each lyric we’d scream along to.

4. “Hey, Hey, What Can I Do” by Led Zeppelin: My dad and brother inspired me to add this back in the summer of 2018. I once heard it on the radio in a restaurant while on a date with someone I felt more enamored with the idea of as opposed to the actual person sitting in front of me. “Oh, I love this song,” I said, partially in truth and partially to subtly convey a level of cool-girl intrigue that didn’t exist. I did like the song (and still do), but in the moment, with my legs pulled up in the booth and my gaze wandering with a falsified casualness, I wanted to exude the same sense of effortless sensuality as Robert Plant when he purrs out the line: “I need to tell her she’s the only one I really love.” (When you read “love,” read it like “looooooooovvve”… really elongate that “o” and almost hum out the last half of the word.) 

5. “In a Black Out” by Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam: August 2018. Played on a loop for two hours on a flight from London to Iceland in a vain attempt to steady my running mind and fall asleep. I wanted the weekend away to re-establish my focus and shake the lingering impulse to tell someone an ocean away (and whose number I resolutely deleted the week prior) about every little thing that happened to me in a day — like how I lost my glasses in a historic library or how exhausting classes abroad felt. I thought by trading one set of surroundings for a new one, I could abandon all my unbidden feelings like a dirty pair of shoes you’ve grown out of. But as the frenetic guitar intro started again and the traitorous desires continued to tip-toe across my mind, I began growing less sure of that possibility.   

6. “Timebomb” by WALK THE MOON (Live Version): Second semester, junior year of college. Dancing and jumping around my bedroom as if in the middle of the throng of concert-goers until my roommate burst through the door to see me breathless, chest heaving and mid-note. Recordings of live music possess an inherently vitalizing quality: their imperfections add a sense of rawness not present in glossy studio versions, and hearing the crowd’s response makes the kinetic energy of a concert palpable, even if you’re just doing homework on a Tuesday night.

7. “Melissa” by The Allman Brothers Band: Summer of 2019. Laying on a lumpy mattress under glaring fluorescent lights in an East Village apartment — the first “home” I’d created where I truly had to start from scratch, deprived of any familiarity found in my home state of Georgia, where I grew up and went to college. I was coloring outside the lines for the first time, and not entirely sure if I liked it. I was trying to journal out the cocktail of loneliness, near-crippling self-doubt, and slight homesickness that consumed my mind. I’d searched for a Georgia-inspired playlist in hopes of curing the latter, and the song came up as one of the options. Listening to it feels like meandering down winding roads on a sticky summer evening with the windows down, the sounds of the radio harmonizing with the choir of cicadas. At the time, I could hear the Southern drawl I desperately missed in each guitar strum, and the ease of the lyrics reminded me of a reassuring, comforting simplicity I yearned for at a time when I felt so displaced.

8. “Magic in the Hamptons” by Social House ft. Lil Yachty: Co-Dependence Day, summer 2019 (the day after the Fourth of July). I spent it repenting for the sins incurred the day before and recuperating with sleeping until noon, over-priced salads, wine, a book, and sunbathing on an Upper West Side rooftop. The afternoon sun transitioned into an evening breeze, goosebumps broke out across my arms despite burying further into the cushions of the couch, but a certain warmth washed through my body as I laughed with my friends over some of the more outlandish lyrics in the song.

9. “Saturdays” by Twin Shadow ft. HAIM: First semester senior year of college in early September 2019, as the vestiges of summer vacation still lingered along with the remnants of white-hot youth that wouldn’t quite cool until the clammy Georgia heat turned crisp and smoky come October. Returning to the languid college town of Athens after a summer internship in the big city left me drunk off a strong shot of confidence I’d never experienced until then. It felt better than any high or wild night out I’d ever had, and my newfound self-assuredness made me eager to maintain the momentum in all facets of my life. Friday evenings spent preparing for Friday nights, and Saturday afternoons spent making one or two reckless (and dehydrated) decisions. No matter how many times I listen to this song, I can never catch the first line on the right beat. 

10. “Don’t Wanna” by HAIM: Added summer 2020, the weekend I moved out of an apartment I hadn’t fully lived in since March and said goodbye to the laidback college town I’d called home for four years. Part of what made me fall in love with Athens is its understated vibrancy. Athens isn’t just some bucolic town in the middle of rural Georgia. It’s a place that seamlessly meshes old-school groove with a warm unhurriedness. Looking back, that’s what this song reminds me of. I’d ridden through these roads countless times before, and never thought twice about the scenes passing my window. But in that moment, driving through downtown streets that slowly morphed into country backroads with my friend in the passenger seat, the song became the soundtrack to my farewell tour. The windows were rolled down and the evening beams combed through our hair as the sun began its descent over miles of cornfields. The final sharp chords disappeared into the dusk as the wind whipped around us. 

Listen to Back Tracks on The Interlude’s Spotify.