darkness at the heart of town
There were several initial musical inspirations for this playlist. The Grimes track that leads it off was one of them, along with the songs by Gordon Lightfoot and Bonnie "Prince" Billy. An Underworld track off their third album was another, but that got cut early on because it didn't fit in with the more ambient nature I was going for in the electronic half of what I was envisioning as a selection of songs that would alternate between that and more folky, or for lack of a better word, "organic" music. Underworld was too sexy. Too propulsive and beat-driven for what I wanted to be a more ambient but heavy feeling.
The title of Bruce Springsteen's album Darkness at the Edge of Town, and all the images it conjures, was another big touchstone. It seemed like a vibrantly relevant concept that could easily be transposed into the present day of late March 2020 when I started this project and darkness seemed to have moved in to the very heart of town.
It had probably always been there.
In plain sight, but invisible to those left unaffected by a touch swirling with everything from passive, quiet menace to outright and literal careless, consequence-less violence. Undeniably harmful, but not entirely corrosive or painful enough to stop and take care of most days. A darkness that lurks in aisles and alleys, through the streets of downtowns spiraling out ever more suburban in a flood that leaves us all separated and stranded on the islands of wherever we call home.
Over the course of the last three months of irregular attention and work, it's largely retained the original structure of alternating between electronic and not. The range of artists and expressions they bring has broadened and diversified the playlist to provide what feels like a stronger and truer version of what I'd originally set out to tap into. In my head, I've also associated this alongside a Halloween playlist from 2018 in the homeward journey it loosely charts, with all the implications and potential for danger that are the everyday for some, and not even a passing thought for others.
The pitch I resisted so long and still don't feel entirely comfortable with is Springsteen by way of Lynch. Like any such capsule, it feels as though it simultaneously elevates and undervalues everything contained in what it describes that is not explicitly Lynchian Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ, even if The Boss is intentionally referenced throughout and closes the playlist. Still, though. It's apt in the way that those two artists are more similar than they outwardly appear, especially through the shared examination and deconstruction of the mythology surrounding Main Street America that informs so much of their work.
Which ultimately leaves us with what I’ve come to think of as a misadventure of wandering through the wrong side of a town that never had a right one. Of becoming someone else, if only briefly, through the experience of the familiar in a novel context, the novel in a familiar context, or the novel context that experience continually provides to the familiar. Of the modest salvation that comes from making it through yet another night to see a new day, and of seeing truths hidden in a sight so plain that no corrective lenses exist to remedy it, or were ever necessary to begin with.