I've been reorganizing the store by autobiographical order instead of alphabetical, which means I pulled out The Kills' "Future Starts Slow" yesterday and remembered exactly where I was when I first heard it. Dick asked what I was doing. "Sorting by the moment it mattered," I told him. He went back to alphabetizing the new arrivals. That's the difference between us.
This playlist sits in the San Antonio section of my life—a trip I didn't take but someone else catalogued perfectly. Family vacation, end of 2022, "capturing the vibe." Here's what I know about capturing vibes: you can't. You can only document what you were running from or running toward. This playlist is fifty-three minutes of someone trying to figure out which direction they were headed. I recognize the impulse.
The Kills into Ghostland Observatory into TOBACCO—that's not vacation music. That's dislocation music. "Silver City" has that Texas space-rock shimmer, sure, but it's outsider music. Austin weirdness bleeding into San Antonio family time. You don't put TOBACCO on a vacation playlist unless the vacation is making you feel like a stranger in your own life. "Hawker Boat" sounds like a carnival viewed through VHS static. Then Beck shows up on "Fresh Hex" and suddenly you're in art-school territory, which means you're thinking too much about everything, which means you're me, which means you're doomed.
Top 5 Albums I Kept From Relationships That Ended:
1. Midnight Boom by The Kills—Laura's copy, still has her coffee ring on the sleeve. "Future Starts Slow" was the last track we both agreed on. Two weeks later, we didn't agree on anything.
2. Robotique Majestique by Ghostland Observatory—From the girl who drove me to ACL in 2008. We broke up before we got home. I kept the album. She kept the car.
3. Maniac Meat by TOBACCO—Not from a relationship, from the aftermath. Bought it the week I moved into the studio apartment. Every track sounds like loneliness in electronic form.
4. Dear Science by TV On The Radio—Sarah said it was too pretentious. That should've been the red flag. Anyone who can't handle "Mercy" can't handle actual mercy.
5. Bombs Away by Sheppard—Wait, wrong band. Sleigh Bells' Treats, obviously. Brody introduced me. Not Brody Dalle. Different Brody. Also gone.
Here's the thing about this sequencing: tracks 7 through 10 are the divorce. "It's Getting Boring By The Sea" into "Mercy" into "Sad Sad City" into "Whirring"—that's someone making peace with the fact that the trip isn't working. The Joy Formidable showed up like a Welsh bulldozer right when this playlist needed noise loud enough to drown out whatever conversation wasn't happening back at the hotel. I've made that playlist. Different songs, same architecture.
The Wall Breaker here is "Sad Sad City," track nine, two-thirds through. Ghostland Observatory knows something about Texas that most bands don't: space doesn't make you feel free, it makes you feel small. Thomas Turner's vocals float over that electronic throb like heat shimmer over asphalt. You're running through something big—San Antonio's missions, maybe, or the Riverwalk at dawn when no one else is awake—and this track makes that bigness intimate. It's the moment the run stops being about the destination and becomes about the motion itself. What came first, the city or the sadness? Doesn't matter. They're the same thing now.
The back half gets dreamy. The Naked And Famous, Sleigh Bells, Discovery—that's 2010-2012 indie, the era when everyone was burying pop hooks under noise. "Rill Rill" is basically a Funkadelic sample wrapped in distortion, which is either genius or theft depending on whether you're Barry or me. Then Black Moth Super Rainbow closes with "The Dark Forest Joggers," which is so perfectly on-the-nose it makes me angry. You don't name a track that and not know exactly what you're doing. It's psychedelic, it's about running, it's in a forest—thanks for the roadmap, guys.
Someone made this playlist to remember how they felt. I run to it trying to forget how I feel. That's the bargain we make with music: it documents the moment, then outlives it, then haunts it. You can't capture a vibe. You can only press record and hope the songs explain it better than you could.
