We are on the cusp of Autumn in this hemisphere, and I’ve been looking through my recent Spotify “likes” to see what grabs me for a new seasonal playlist. And it occurs to me that I never shared my two previous seasonal playlists here. Oops!
So, in the spirit of “Better Late Than Never,” please allow me to present Wild and Bold Extremes, and All Summer 🎉
Both playlists follow my usual formula:
- Choose a bunch of songs by some favorite artists
- Add in some good stuff I found while Shazam-ing music from tv shows, commercials, coffee shops, playlists the kids were listening to, and stores I was shopping in 🙂
- If a theme emerges, look for a few new tunes that follow that theme
- Remove any songs that are not seasonally appropriate (for example, does it mention snow, and it’s a summer playlist?) and save them for a future mix
- Listen to the remaining collection a few times and pull out anything I won’t want to hear 100 more times over the next few months
This is pretty much the way I build a playlist every time, and I aim to finish with 20-25 songs, generally.
It is a far cry from my early mix tape making days, where I would just sit on the floor with a pile of CDs and flip through them, committing songs to tape as the whim struck me, until I’d filled 90 minutes. I still love some of those off-the-cuff playlists, thirty-ish years later.
Wild and Bold Extremes
The title is taken from the first track, “Witness Tree,” a favorite from Guster’s most recent album.
The image was taken eight years ago, when Aidan and I stopped at a coffee shop at the end of a pleasant Saturday afternoon drive. I’m not sure the extremes in this photo could really be described as “wild” or “bold” but I liked how one of us has a hot green drink in a short fat cup, and the other has a cold brown drink in a tall skinny cup.
All Summer
The title for this one is taken from the title of the second track.
And the cover image? Why yes, it’s me drinking something warm and lovely again 😁 (I have no intention of stopping. The working title for my Autumn playlist is “Mug Cradling Weather” so…)
I took this photo in the summer of 2022, when we were staying in an awesome former schoolhouse, and I would spend the warm mornings rocking on the porch swing with a cup of coffee and a molasses cookie, enjoying the sunlight, and the lack of bugs on the screened-in porch.
I resurrected the old-fashioned record Photoshop template I originally made in 2014 for this one.
There’s still a little bit of summer left for enjoying this one, so I hope you do!
