Top 5 albums I tell people I listen to when I run: Fugazi's Repeater, Mission of Burma's Vs., Gang of Four's Entertainment!, some obscure Unwound EP, maybe Refused if I'm being honest about needing energy. What I actually put on more than I'll admit: this Sublime playlist. All Bradley Nowell. All the stuff I loved before I decided to have taste.
Here's the thing nobody tells you about running: the first mile is a liar. Your body says everything hurts, your brain says go home, and you need something that doesn't require you to think too hard about whether you're experiencing art or just noise. Sublime works because it's not trying to be important. "Doin' Time" opens this thing and it's summer 1997 and you're not running toward enlightenment, you're just moving.
Bradley died in '96, two months before Sublime's self-titled album made them massive. By the time I was running to "Badfish" and "40oz. To Freedom," he'd been gone for years, and Rome Ramirez was out there singing these songs with the surviving members, and look—Rome's fine. Technically proficient. But it's like when a band replaces their lead singer and something essential is just missing. Not worse, necessarily. Just not the same. This playlist is the original guy. The one who didn't make it out.
The sequencing here moves through Sublime's entire catalog like flipping through someone's record collection at a party. Early stuff, covers, deep album cuts, that Gwen Stefani duet from '97 that still sounds like two people who got each other. "Saw Red" hits around the midpoint and it's Bradley and Gwen trading verses about betrayal, and you remember that Gwen was dating Tony Kanal, that No Doubt and Sublime ran in the same Long Beach circles, that everyone was young and terrible to each other in ways they'd write songs about later.
The Wall Breaker here is "40oz. To Freedom," track twelve, and by that point you've been running for thirty-five minutes and your legs are asking questions you don't have answers for. What makes it work is that it's not some pumped-up anthem. It's a mid-tempo shuffle, Brad Nowell half-singing about getting drunk and getting by, and somehow that's exactly what you need when running stops being about fitness and starts being about whether you can finish what you started. The guitar tone is cheap and perfect. Lou Dog probably barking in the background. It's not trying to save you. It's just there.
What came first: the music or the decision to be okay with liking uncool things? Sublime isn't cool. Never was in certain circles. Too frat party, too acoustic guitar at the beach, too many people with bad weed and worse opinions claiming this as their favorite band. But "Steppin' Razor" is a Peter Tosh cover done right. "Scarlet Begonias" takes the Grateful Dead and makes it sound like it belongs in a skate video. Sublime was a band of music nerds—reggae, punk, hip-hop, whatever worked—and they were better at this than anyone wants to admit.
By the time you hit "Rivers Of Babylon" at the end, you've run five miles, maybe six, and you're not fixed. The thing I thought running would solve—work, chaos, the feeling that I'm always behind on something—it's all still there. But for fifty-six minutes, I had Bradley Nowell and a playlist that didn't ask me to be smarter than I am.
Dick would tell me the exact label and pressing of every track here. Barry would fight me about whether Sublime belongs on a running playlist at all, whether this is even real ska punk or just white guys appropriating reggae. And maybe he's right. But it works. It works when the Lakefront Trail is empty and the wind off the lake is punishing and you need something that sounds like summer even when it's not.
