ode to music that doesn't mask

(a.k.a. my end of year playlist is here)

You may know the story, but I like to tell it, and tell it tweaked, every year.

The Christmas after I graduated from college, I made a playlist. Or, rather, I burned eighteen songs on a slick, blank CD. I called it Femme Bonds and sent it to seven college girlfriends and one high school best friend. I said, “Here. Here are the femme-fronted anthems that are getting me through this strange and sober entry into adulthood.” I declared the coffee house days of Jason Mraz and John Mayer dead. I decided “pump up” music was what we needed to survive—new roommates (some of them husbands), new commutes (most of them in new cities), new ideas of who we were and supposed to become.

Well, none of that nonsense this year.

Because, along with the poet May Sarton, now we become ourselves. After “many years and places,” after whole decades of being “dissolved and shaken,” after a near lifetime of wearing “other people’s faces,” what we need is not to pump up but ground down. What we need is not to survive but to surrender. What we need, what I need after one of the most bitterly sweet years of my life, is music that doesn’t ask me to mask but to marvel. At being human. This human. A human who likes her music more moody than most. “Vampire” tastes, or so the streaming service algorithm says.

I don’t fault my younger self for armoring up. She was right that the world does no favors for vampiric ladies. But, and this is what I love about being on the cusp of forty, I don’t want its favors this year. I’m too tired to strive for much of anything. I’m happier and happier with being happy enough. Which sometimes looks like being happily unhappy. Or nonplussed by the happiness scale altogether. Happy is a lovely country. But it is not my homeland, though I may visit for a spell each year. Well, enough. There are other countries worth our while.

My youngest daughter likes to listen to “Espresso Depresso,” too. These are the therapist’s words, not mine. She tells Youngest to limit her daily servings. This makes sense to me. To revel only in the bluer moods of life is its own kind of masking, especially when you have yet to experiment with the full range of who you are and may become. So, maybe that’s why this pivotal, rotten banana of a year felt ripe enough to embrace the music I love most: low-vibes, high-feels, pretty and haunting and punchy and cloudy. Cloudy is a lovely kind of country, too. I do adore its people.

So, here it is, from me to you: Femme Bonds XVIII. (This year’s version includes some bonus masc-fem duets, too). Give it a whirl when you’ve got no whirl left to give. Listen to it alone when you want to go home, to feel your own weather and measure. Tell me what songs, what lines, make you feel most yourself—vampire vibes and all.

Now we becomes ourselves, with every passing year and playlist.

XO,
Erin

me, sending you peace and a happy (or not) new year