#26: The only music I could listen to while sick

This week’s playlist: Spotify / Apple Music

Listening notes

• The Robber Robber song was a standout for me this week. That build is something.
• Big numbers with big beats: blissful bedroom house from Böhm, a rancorous, speaker-rattling track from Ole Mic Odd, and even a Sugababes remake.
• The new JPEGMAFIA song really, really works for me. I have not clicked much with the new stuff—or any new stuff, but more about why below —but this track feels like my way in.
• More new Seefeel? I can hardly believe it. That the music is as good as it is makes it twice as delightful.
• —__--___ had one of my favorite albums from 2021—The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid—so I’m excited to hear more from that project.
• Yes, the Chrystabell/David Lynch song. Yes, you won’t regret it.

I put together this week’s playlist over the past week or so, but the week before that I couldn’t listen to anything new at all.

Here's what happened: I got sick, one of those vague is-it-or-isn’t-it Covid/bad cold/must be allergies/yeah unlikely. (I never tested positive, yet I continued to feel awful, and who even knows.) There was fever, fatigue, a lot of bed.

What better time, I figured, than to try and listen to new music and work on this newsletter? And this is where things got weird. I started listening to my playlists of new songs but couldn’t exactly comprehend what I was hearing, as if my brain and what I was hearing were out of sync, an audio short circuit. I’m always trying to unlock the music I listen to, and in this case I was just way too ill for it.

Instead, I needed something hopeful, a little dreamy, music that could pick up where the ibuprofen left off and send me further out of my misery. But I also needed music it to be familiar, music that wasn’t going to task my offline brain in attempting anything new.

I tried Music for Airports, but the untethered-ness of “1/1” gave me actual bedspins, so I switched to the more grounded Plateaux of Mirror, and that was taking me down the right path, but right then I needed just a little more—but not too much—human connection. Which landed me with Cocteau Twins.

Familiarity, songs I’ve heard countless times, words but not exactly words, and really just something that would make me feel a little better about my predicament, at least until I lost consciousness again.

These aren’t the best Cocteau Twins songs—that would be all of them—but they are the best Cocteau Twins songs to convalesce to.

Listen here: Spotify / Apple Music