Spin This Vol. 1 (Jan 5 2025)
5 songs for this week. Would you share something you're listening to?
This isn’t a music recommendation newsletter.
Much of what’s stopped me for years now from starting anything like this is the worry that it would come across that way. Everyone deserves the AUX cord. Everyone deserves to share the music they love. There is nothing so special about my tastes that merits a regular place in your inbox.
I really hope for this to be a music connection newsletter.
A few years ago I started something on my Instagram. Every month I shared a few of my favorite songs and I put out an ask for the songs that others love right now. It started with a handful of my closest friends saving me from humiliation until it became the primary way I stay connected with so many wonderful people. Former students. Someone I stood next to at a concert ten years ago. Internet friends that date back so far I don’t even remember how we met. I’m no longer texting “How’s work going?” to a hundred weary people just to keep a social balloon in the air. Now, every month or two, I might get a virtual fist-bump from these folks in the form of a track that now also comes with good memories. Sometimes it kindles deeper connections that would have otherwise been lost. Sometimes I meet someone new.
For the longest time I’ve wanted to open the doors to a party and welcome in everyone who loves music. I want to share what I feel with other people who want to listen, and I want to invite you to share what you’re listening to and what it makes you think about, if not with me then with others in your life. I hope this newsletter can be a version of that party. I’m really grateful you’re here with me, for however long you’d like to be, for whatever reasons you have. I can’t wait to hear all your favorite songs.
Your biggest fan,
AW
“Homesickness Pt. 1” by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru
Last week my favorite movie theater emailed to say they’re struggling. They asked–please–if we, as people who have been there before, could buy a friend a gift card, or stop in for an upcoming show. It was a vulnerable message that you could never fathom receiving from an AMC, possibly because shame still exists in small ways for mega corporations, and because there the manager doesn’t ask you how you’ve been, and there you haven’t scrawled your favorite poem on the bathroom stall door with the marker they have hanging from a string, and there you haven’t pet the team dog.
It made me think of all the films I didn’t see there because it was too cold to walk and I didn’t want to look for parking. I don’t have any delusions that my single ticket and large popcorn would mean the difference between survival and closure for them, but I know that if they can’t get me of all people to the theater on a regular basis, things are probably even more difficult than they let on. Two things are true: That indie movie theaters have provided me with memories that have shaped my identity, and that I’ve repeatedly chosen to stay home and stream something from my TV to save $10 and not have to interact with anyone.
Today, in the first week of a year that more so than most feels rumbling with unrest, I’m listening to Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru. If I wanted to waste time I might get into what I think her style shares with jazz, and blues, and classical music. Instead I just want to say that Emahoy’s songs sound exactly the way that life’s mysteries feel–and I’ll leave it at that.
The only reason I know about Emahoy at all is because one of my favorite labels, Mississippi Records, rescued and reissued a collection of her piano compositions after it had been out of print for almost 50 years. How else would an Ethiopian nun writing music in the 1940s have become my most played artist since 2022?
When I’m honest with myself, I remember that I’ve never needed an algorithm to discover things I love. My favorite record labels, cinemas, and bookstores–and my friends–surface more things to me than I could possibly consume in my lifetime. I’ve found no fewer disappointments through Spotify’s Discover Weekly than I have through buying a record because I liked the cover, and besides: How many of us think about searching for something that excites us as a waste of time? What is our free time for, if not that?
This year I’m thinking less in terms of resolutions and more in terms of mantra, and mine for this year is this: We have to live in the house that we build for ourselves. I think of this in the most literal sense in the morning when I’m climbing over a guitar I no longer play to reach my sock drawer. So this is the year I’ll sell the guitar, because I haven’t picked that guitar up in months, but I wear socks every day. And then there are my favorite artists, who are pleading with me to buy their merch, or go to shows, or even just listen to their music instead of hitting play on the Chill Dinner Party Vibes playlist. How would it feel to learn that someone I love called it quits because they couldn’t compete with the sheer avalanche of content big companies can bankroll and prioritize putting in front of me? Would these artists exist if I didn’t listen to them? And who would I be if these artists didn’t exist? (Note: I highly recommend a Liz Pelly article in this month’s edition of Harper’s, which exposes the ways that Spotify populates these “vibes” playlists with milquetoast, data-driven stock music, which endangers artists’ already microscopic royalties)
There is no perfect existence. We’ll eat rest stop McDonald’s and watch junk movies on Netflix, and we aren’t villains for it. Still, I’m finding it harder to be at peace with myself as I pile up decisions made out of convenience rather than my values, and this year I intend to take steps to reconcile the things I want to populate my days with the things I do to populate them. There’s too much to be in awe about to give my time to things about which I’m one notch above indifferent. I exist in a timeline when Emahoy made beautiful music. It demanded just a little more from me than an algorithm to find that out. I think she’s worth it.
Four more
“Moonlight Flight” by Makoto Iwabuchi
Never in my adult life have I felt as chill as this song sounds.
Some of that is constant, low-grade anxiety and the rest is a Boomer principle that’s unfortunately true: Everything is indeed getting worse all of the time. City pop was born in the late 70s. Were those years as smooth and joyful as this sound might have you believe? I can’t say for sure, and I don’t much trust the undoubtedly biased opinion of anyone who might be able to weigh in. I just can’t imagine anyone inventing this genre today if it didn’t already exist.
“Better at Making Time” by De Lux
There is a guitar riff toward the end of this that’s so perfect it could out-duel most pop music choruses. De Lux clearly knows it, because they roll out a sixty-second red carpet building up to that riff, then let that riff strut for four minutes. If only this track came out before Paris is Burning was filmed. Imagine the vogue Venus Xtravaganza could do to this.
(For the impatient: Fast forward to the 3:55 mark to soak in that guitar, though I’d really encourage you to let yourself experience the full on-ramp).
“Wanna Kiss” by Hitomi Tohyama
It could have stayed the modest funk track it starts as and it would still be easy to love. Then it melts into a bridge that belongs next to Bobby Caldwell’s decades-long viral sensation “What You Won’t Do For Love” in the way it stirs you. It’s like that little hammer the doctor uses to hit your knee, but it’s testing the reflexes in your soul. I can’t imagine any of us failing this one.
”Honki Ponki” by Senay
I have a friend who is an elite texter. She never hits you with a “How have you been?” Instead, after a few weeks of silence, you wake up to a message: “I NEED YOU TO KNOW ABOUT THIS SONG.” And I know she’s right, and I stop what I’m doing, and I listen. Because, of course, she’s introducing me to a disco-adjacent 1980s Turkish pop track that I never would have heard without her. It has the simple, child-like glee of finding a prize in a cereal box, and it gives you the permission to rediscover that for yourself. Just too, too fun. Thanks, AB.