#32: Without any fear

This week’s new music:
Spotify
Apple Music

I have a vague sense of holiday-ness around this playlist. This isn’t holiday music, not exactly, but it feels like it, or enough like it that I held on to some of these tracks for a few weeks because I suspected they’d be right for this week.

What marks the music for me around this time of year are highly personal, specific pings of nostalgia: Does this song feel like childhood anticipation so intense it can’t be dampened by a 90-minute car trip to the grandparents? Or does it feel like the hot-and-cold angst of a teenager with two weeks off, eyeing every moment as a chance to escape family? Or like the moment your plane touches down on an annual journey back home, returning once more to the warmth of old friends and family?

What ties all this together for me, and what can make any music feel like holiday music, is the bittersweet. It’s a complicated, and also a contradictory time of year. Hurried and relaxing, saccharine and sincere. An end and a beginning.