heart on a stick, dipped in a vat of burnt sugar

or, a playlist : songs for the lovestruck and forlorn

Here's a playlist I've kept from one iPod to the next. I don't really have a name for it other than the generic Acoustic Ballads, but I've learned to live with it. Any other adjective would be inaccurate, any other noun contrived. Songs have come and gone on this list, but they all have one thing in common: they're stripped down songs about love, loss and yearning, and they're unabashedly sentimental. It doesn't necessarily mean they're gooey and clichéd. Most of them are not off-the-shelf expressions of abstract feelings, but experiences written as stories, as intentions, as streams of consciousness. 

As usual, you can listen to the songs two ways: Click on the image below to hear them all in one go, or on the song titles to hear each song individually.

1. Somebody That I Used To Know : Elliott Smith
   
2. No Fear Of Falling : I Am Kloot
   
3. Saturday : Josh Rouse
   
4. Naked As We Came : Iron & Wine
   
5. To Be Alone With You : Sufjan Stevens
   
6. I Wouldn't Miss It For The World : Johnathan Rice
   
7. Poetry & Aeroplanes : Teitur
   
8. Sleeping To Dream : Jason Mraz
   
9. Only You : Joshua Radin
   
10. Your Sweet Voice : The Reindeer Section
    
11. Trouble : Ray LaMontagne
    
12. My Winding Wheel : Ryan Adams
    
13. Kathleen : Josh Ritter
    
14. Dogs : Damien Rice
    
15. Silent Sigh : Badly Drawn Boy
    
16. Babylon : David Gray
    
17. On Your Side : Pete Yorn
    

hello, what's this?

everything hits at once (for discos) : spoon

click here or on the image below to listen

Okay, so I'm still officially off the air, but as I was cleaning my iDisk last weekend, I found quite a few songs I had uploaded but have somehow forgotten to post. In fact, there are seven of them, and I'm putting them up here in single installments, for added suspense. Or something. This here is the funkier version of the first song off Spoon's 2001 album, Girls Can Tell. Everything Hits At Once is a post-breakup song that captures the unease that sets in right after the end of a relationship. It's not quite sadness, but an emptiness that's almost corporeal. You actually feel something hollow in your chest. A chasm that grows every minute you're made aware of your sudden solitude. A vacuum that turns into a whirlpool that sucks you in with every memory of your own mistakes. You want to plug this hole. You want to save yourself. You try to do something, anything – a haircut, a singles bar, a pornographic site – just to take your mind far away from your insignificant reality, but you only end up being spaced out, making a fool of yourself as a matter of course. You catch your own reflection in the elevator door, and it mocks you. Get a grip, for heaven's sake! And you let out a laugh, a sob, a drawn-out sigh. It feels good. You close your eyes, breathe in, breathe out. And tomorrow you'll get over it. Best line: Merging in traffic, cross the lanes, and then we become something bigger than just anyone. Best part: The xylophonic loop that's absent in the original.