#5 58 degrees

or, music fit for January

January is hard. We’re coming down from the excitement and anxieties of the holidays and It’s still winter, but all of the good stuff is behind us and spring is still too far away. A significant portion of society is on a diet, which means you either are compelled to broadcast your self imposed performative misery or you spend your time wondering if you too should be on a diet and drinking less and taking your health back because now that you mention it, I have gained some weight over the last six weeks (2 years) but I’d rather not talk about. For folks like myself who participate in the academia adjunct hustle, we subject ourselves to this scheduling conundrum in which we are preparing for our new semester of courses at the same time we are working on all of our materials to apply for our jobs for the following year. 

This January feels especially hard. The typical holiday anxieties were heightened thanks to Omicron causing many of us to either take on additional risk to see friends and family we had planned to finally see again, or decide last minute it wasn’t worth it. Neither decision felt good, and the cloud of uncertainty persists. While January is usually the time of the year folks like myself plan for their schedule of events and fairs for the year to prepare for, conversations with fellow artists all seem to be more about the hesitancy about even knowing what to work for, trying to guess which events will even happen. 

A Mixtape Left Behind #5: 58 Degrees

Listen on Spotify. (Sorry, no youtube music this time around)

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With all of this in mind, instead of a new playlist this month, I’m sharing one of my longform playlists, 58 Degrees. It’s 81 songs and clocks in at over 5 hours, so I won’t be including the full tracklist this time around, but can tell you it's full of songs vaguely in the indie/folk genre from the 2010s with peppering of idiosyncratic 70’s and 80’s tracks. I recommend putting this one on random when you need a companion for a full day of home and work tasks or on a long drive alone.

I have a habit of starting playlists with a vague mood in mind and then slowly working on them until they feel complete, an equally intangible conclusion. I began this playlist in the winter of 2017. It was my first semester of teaching and my commute required a drive that included a 7 mile bridge across the bay. The western most portion of this bridge lay directly in the descent flight path into SFO. On days the bridge was not covered in fog, I loved watching the massive planes completing their transcontinental flights and thinking about where they had come from and who it’s passengers might be. This was my original headspace for this playlist. It likely comes as no surprise this has become my go to playlist for flying.

This was also the period anxiety and panic attacks first became a recognizable part of my life. Coincidentally it is also the period I would define as my mother’s last days. Aspects of both of these things play roles in the mood of this playlist. As does the active traveling I did for art fairs and multiple Bay Area winters. A keen observer will notice I remember this playlist exists each January and then forget mid summer. I stopped regularly adding to this playlist in the fall of 2019, blissfully in the before times. 

I hope you enjoy, and please let me know what you think. 

Have opinions, requests, or ideas for future playlists? I’d love to hear about them.