Building playlists have become a part of our lives now because of the new ways we listen to music. If you could build a perfect playlist of ten songs. what would be the theme and what would be on that list? Explain the theme and why you chose those songs, or some of the songs.
Christy's playlist is here and Carol's is here.
The Greenbelt Playlist
2. "Runnin' Down a Dream" Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
3. "The Chain" Fleetwood Mac
4. "The Weight" The Band with the Staple Singers (from The Last Waltz)
5. "Rockin' in the Free World" Neil Young
6. "My City was Gone" The Pretenders
7. "Video Killed the Radio Star" The Buggles
8. "Love Shack" B-52s
9. "Desperados Waiting for a Train" Highwaymen
10. "Sunshine" Jonathan Edwards and the Seldom Scene
This playlist does not have the universal appeal the many playlists created, say, on Amazon might.
That is because this is a list of songs that take me back to the the three years, from September 2014 to September 2017 when the Deke and I lived in Greenbelt, Maryland. Moving to Kellogg has turned out to be a very good decision. While I love being here, I also loved living in Greenbelt and I enjoy finding ways to transport myself back to our little apartment home, our evenings at the Old Line Bistro in Beltsville, Quench in Silver Spring, and DC Brau in very north and east of Washington, D. C. I sometimes long to be back in my weekly water aerobics class. I miss the throb of Washington, D.C. and the constant movement of things in the suburbs. I miss all the trees, the parks, the many beers we enjoyed, and I sometimes I miss the autonomy, how I could roam neighborhoods in Washington, D. C. or go shopping at Wegmans in Lanham or Columbia or try out a Vietnamese restaurant in Brookland and enjoy the privacy of no one knowing me.
A few things tie some of these songs together as reminders of living in Greenbelt. The Deke and I enjoyed sitting at the bar at the Old Line Bistro and we often drummed up conversations with people we didn't really know or we talked to each other, often wondering what we were going to do next in our life together. I think the house music was a Pandora station and most often a series of songs would play and get no response from us. But, toward the end of our time going to Old Line, management played a station that regularly featured Jerry Douglas' version of "The Boxer" with Mumford and Sons and Paul Simon singing and every time it came on, we fell silent and were moved by the delicate and soaring, even haunting, beauty of Jerry Douglas moving this gorgeous song forward with his work on the dobro guitar.
The rotation of songs almost always included Tom Petty and Heartbreakers, too. The Deke wasn't stopped cold by hearing Tom Petty, but I was and often after hearing "Runnin' Down a Dream" at Old Line, I'd jump online in our apartment home, put earbuds, and listen again, primarily so I could listen, listen, and listen again to Mike Campbell's guitar solo -- a perfect musical expression of the spirit and the lyrics of this song.
In addition, I enjoyed meeting up with Scott Shirk in New York City two or three different times when we lived in Greenbelt. Inevitably, we talked about music. I enjoyed explaining my preference for Tom Petty over Bob Dylan as a songwriter and musician and, even more, I enjoyed our conversations about Levon Helm's genius as a singer and drummer, especially with The Band and so "The Weight" takes me back to those conversations.
One of my very best trips while living in Greenbelt took place in October of 2016 when I traveled to Savannah, GA to officiate Scott and Cate Shirk's wedding. At the reception that followed, a DJ played dance music and I sat still at the table where I'd been seated until the B-52's "Love Shack" came over the sound system and suddenly it was 1989-90 again at the WOW Hall and I danced as hard as I could for about four minutes. My love for the B-52s had been awakened a few years earlier by posts Julie Fether, now Julie Rockwell, made on Facebook about her love for them and wouldn't you know it -- a year later, I traveled to Huntingdon, PA to serve as officiant for Julie and Curtis's wedding.
I used to subscribe to Entertainment Weekly, as part of being a member of the American Film Institute. I never cared much for the magazine, but early in 2017 (I think), the magazine published a little thing about Fleetwood Mac's album, Rumours and I became preoccupied with how I'd never appreciated Fleetwood Mac and how now, forty years later, all I wanted to do in our little apartment home was listen to Fleetwood Mac. I felt a new thrill listening to Lindsay Buckingham play the guitar, especially on "The Chain" and even had fantasies of Babes with Axes working up their own version of this song so they could apply their inventive harmonies to that stirring opening ("Listen to the wind blow") and TR could be featured playing Jon McVie's gnarly bass riff at the center of the song. I don't think this fantasy will ever come true!
When September, 2014 rolled around, it was the first time since I was a five year old that I didn't have any affiliation as a student or an employee with a school. I spent a lot of time thinking about things, especially about times in my life that I thought I could roll back time, pretend like something I was involved with could be rewound and I could lose the cassette tape as if it never happened. I was stupid. I've thought a lot about my folly and one song I listened to often because it put this folly into words was "Video Killed the Radio Star" and this line: "In my mind and in my car, we can't rewind, we've gone too far."
I used to play little concerts of YouTube videos in our little apartment home for the Deke and me and almost always these concerts featured The Highwaymen singing Guy Clark's "Desperados Waiting for a Train". I gave myself private concerts, too, and over and over again I listened to Neil Young's thrashing guitar solo in one electric version after another of "Rockin' in the Free World."
When we drove out to Ben and Tana's wedding with Patrick and again when we drove across the USA to move to Kellogg, we stayed in Elyria, OH, a bleak scar of suburb, a testimony to how the high hopes of a booming economy in the late 1990s came crashing down in 2008 and places like Elyria never recovered. Chrissie Hynde saw it all coming back in 1982 in her lamentation, "My City is Gone", performed by The Pretenders.
When we moved to Greenbelt, I had hoped to get out to places like the Birchmere in Alexandria, VA or to small venues in the countryside of Virginia and Maryland that featured bluegrass music. I never did. One immortal Sunday afternoon, however, I went to a lively bluegrass jam at Atlas Brewing, but it was the only live bluegrass music I ever heard. To compensate, I listened to videos of the Seldom Scene on YouTube. For years, the Seldom Scene was a premier bluegrass band in Washington, D. C. and I got to hear them back in 1988 at the WOW Hall in Eugene. My favorite Seldom Scene track features Jonathan Edwards singing his great song, "Sunshine" with the Seldom Scene and it makes me think not so much of what I did while living in Greenbelt, but of what I left undone and unexperienced.
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