2020GQ mix: Linkin Park- Iridescent

All of my closest relationships have given me music that I might not have ever discovered, a fact for which I am dearly grateful and indeed something I consider one of the true joys of getting to know someone. My parents, my few intimate relationships, and some of my closest friends have all contributed to this playlist.

My most recent obsession is courtesy of my betrothed- ‘twas largely Helen’s driving playlist that brought me to Linkin Park (for everyone who has worked around me in the last nine months or so and endured endless hours of my very finest Chester Bennington, in part they have Helen to thank).

I love these guys, especially the middle of their catalogue, because they understand in terms that are familiar to me how difficult it can be to be a conscious critter in this world; but also because their songs steer clear of the maudlin and cling to some need to keep fighting and looking for lights at the end of tunnels.

This is one of my favorites- really a redemptive anthem in the face of  an apocalypse. One that’s personal in scale, perhaps, but in a potentially actual apocalypse, everybody is having a bit of a personal one, I think.

2020GQ mix: Peter Gabriel- Here Comes the Flood

I’m going to leave the melancholy behind soon, and in truth, the chorus on this track bursts out of it some already. I definitely had an obsessive phase with Peter Gabriel, listening to his double-sided live album almost every night for months on end, driving home from my minimum wage mall job in the early nineties. One of the earlier bands I got into was sort of mid-career Genesis (Duke, Abacab, Genesis), and that led me to Gabriel, even though he had left the band years before those albums. I suppose Say Anything also factored in- Your Eyes is an iconic 80s song that survived the decade and people still reference to this day. But he made made so many fantastic tracks, and his voice seemed to come from some kind of ethereal realm of a disembodied future. Both organic and technological, raspy and pure, a seamless blend of falsetto and lower register, his voice always seemed to soar during his songs. Here Comes the Flood is so good: it is sad and even ominous but not defeated. To my ear, it laments what used to be, trembles at the uncertainty of what is coming within the certainty that it must come, but also looks toward the light of some indefinite time after the disaster recedes. It’s also such a beautiful song. The original with the big chorus is fantastic, and a later, softer version that is mostly piano is absolutely heart-breaking.  “It’ll be those who gave their islands to survive…”

2020GQ mix: John Cale- Hallelujah

Ok- Hallelujah. Most things I love kind of stay mine: my tastes and proclivities tend not to line up with most folks’, so most of my joys don’t get worn out by mass culture. But this song, which I first heard in the early 90s and long would describe as maybe the greatest song ever written, caught mass cultural fire. It’s a testament to the resiliency of Hallelujah that it still can resonate even after being played Marianas-Trench-deep into the ground over the last ten or fifteen years, and through multiple iterations. I suspect the original, written and performed by Leonard Cohen, might not be everyone’s cup of tea. It’s not my favorite, honestly, though I love the big chorus. It’s a very different beast from what people love from Shrek and Rufus Wainwright, which is truly lovely. But I think that owes more to John Cale (Lou Reed’s friend and former bandmate) and this track than Cohen’s original. Cale’s is the version I heard, in the Basquiat soundtrack around 1990, and it remains my favorite. He invested it with a broken-hearted mournfulness that is what I think is at the heart of this song’s beauty. It’s been with me my whole adult life, has figured prominently into my personal soundtrack, and works for the sense of loss, big and small, that’s going around these days.