As soon as the days visibly shorten and the air gets cool, I experience a mood best described as "cozy-morose." It is a mood for curling up under a blanket with a cup of tea and reveling in feeling just a bit sad.
In 2017, with some help from Pinterest (which was still good at the time), I put together The Cozy-Morose Playlist. It lived on my Rhapsody account and later on my Spotify account. Since I'm no longer willing to pay for music without owning it, it's currently on PipePipe (my current-favorite anonymous YouTube frontend).
I tried to send a link to Gremlin yesterday, only to remember that PipePipe saves playlists to the local device only. Which makes sense. YouTube doesn't need to know what I'm playlisting.
Bonus: This means it exported in a handy text format, which I can now share with y'all.
The Head and the Heart - Down in the Valley
Spanish Sahara - Foals
Mumford & Sons - Winter Winds
Simon & Garfunkel - The Only Living Boy in New York
Radical Face - Welcome Home, Son
Angus & Julia Stone - Here We Go Again
The Head and the Heart - Lost in My Mind
David Bowie - Changes
Beat Happening - Indian Summer
Fleet Foxes - Blue Spotted Tai
Seabear - Seashell
Ugly Casanova - Hotcha Girls
The Head and the Heart - Cats and Dogs
Fleet Foxes - Oliver James
John Denver - Take Me Home, Country Roads
City and Colour - Northern Wind
Collin McLoughlin - Titanium Acoustic Cover
Benjamin Francis Leftwich - Atlas Hands
Aunt Martha - Steal Back
The Paper Kites - Bloom
The Neighbourhood - Sweater Weather
Ben Howard - Old Pine
Bon Iver - Holocene
Mansionair - Hold Me Down
Daughter - Run
Of Monsters and Men - Mountain Sound
Little Dragon - Twice:
James Blake - A Case Of You
alt-J - Hunger Of The Pine
James Vincent McMorrow - Cavalier
Jake Bugg - Simple As This
Tallest Man on Earth - Little Brother
Kimya Dawson - Tire Swing
Hozier - Work Song
Taylor Swift - All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor's Version)
Lord Huron - Ends of the Earth
City of the Sun - "to the sun and all the cities in between"
Hozier - Cherry Wine
The Lumineers - Ophelia
Vance Joy - Like Gold
A friend sent me Taylor Swift's "Midnights" when it came out, saying "I know you feel like you can't listen to music right now but I think you can handle this." She was right. That album got me through the first few years of widowhood, when I needed music that both (a) dealt with loss and (b) made no intellectual demands on me whatsoever.
I can no longer take Taylor Swift seriously. And also. She has become a trainwreck I can't stop watching. "The Life of a Showgirl" was the moment of impact, though I saw it coming with "Tortured Poets Department," which was far too self-absorbed and self-referential imo.
Anyway, I guess she dropped four more songs that are somehow supposed to be related to "Showgirl," though I only kindasorta see it. They're all on the Internet Archive so you don't have to give a billionaire more money:
I listened but did not bother to download them. They are, frankly, kinda baffling. I especially have questions about "Pink Clouding." Does she not know what pink clouding/pink cloud syndrome is, in which case this song is just weird? Or *does* she know, in which case are we going to get a July 4 album drop titled "Independence Day" in the next few years? (Recall her wedding was July 3.) MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.
Also, "Cleveland!" uses the city as a barely veiled stand-in for her husband, so if we don't get a million Family Guy memes from this I will be disappointed.
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