Wish I Didn't Miss You by Angie Stone

I spent the whole summer DJing The Surf Lodge in Montauk, which, if you haven't been, is a riotously successful party spot/restaurant/hotel situated on the farthest point of Long Island, New York. They call it Montauk, End of the Earth — that's how far away it is — and it's a onetime sleepy surf town converted into the biggest summer party spot for young New Yorkers with money to spend. You'd hear stories of the bigger bars making multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars of liquor sales a day, multiple days a week, June through September.

To get there from my house on the East side of the East Village I'd traverse Manhattan to Penn Station on the West side then catch a train due East, changing at Jamaica, Queens, passing through Westhampton, Hampton Bays, Southampton, Bridgehampton, East Hampton, Amagansett, and finally arriving at Montauk. The whole trip apartment-door-to-hotel-room usually took me about four and a half hours, and I'd do it in reverse every Sunday, always leaving on the 7:06pm train, and hopefully arriving home just before midnight.

On a Friday, no matter what time of day I left to try and avoid the crowds, the train would be standing-room-only, and I'd park myself right next to the toilet because at 35 years of age I have not yet mastered the art of going multiple hours without peeing.

I spent most of those journeys listening to audiobooks and podcasts, but I needed a lot of music to play during the four hour sets at Surf Lodge. It wasn't always a wild party; there were quieter moments, like Friday afternoons before the crowds showed up, and the more chilled out Sunday breakfast sets. Wish I Didn't Miss You by Angie Stone served multiple purposes: I fecking love a breakup song, so I'd often pass 20 or so minutes listening to it on repeat on my headphones on the train, but from a DJing standpoint it was the perfect transition song to take me from relaxed to party in three easy steps — the beat starts off smooth and chill, but the chorus goes hard and mixes perfectly into Smooth Operator by Sade, which mixes perfectly into Together Again by Janet Jackson, and boom the party was on.

The funny thing is I'd forgotten about this song for years, and then on a random day in April or May the lyrics, "I can't eat I can't sleep anymore," popped into my head so I googled them, and here we are.

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So Into You by Fabolous ft Tamia

One of my best friends lost her virginity with this song soundtracking the momentous occasion and if that's not one of the most romantique things you've ever heard then you and I have very different definitions of romance.

I didn't actually know So Into You by Fabolous ft Tamia was a remix until years later — the original Tamia version came out in 1998 and rules but the 2016 live cover version by Childish Gambino on an Australian radio station is literal baby making music.

I remember the summer this song came out. I was 19 and my best friends Sheida and Nic and I drove up to Whangarei at the top of the North Island of New Zealand and listened to it on repeat along with Can't Let You Go — Fabolous' other hit song from his 2003 album Street Dreams — plus a lot of Common, Talib Kweli, Angie Stone, Dead Prez, Erykah Badu, that one song Flake by Jack Johnson, Blink 182 and Fleetwood Mac. We'd change the words of So Into You to our own last names so that when he raps, "Since you been asking our good friends how'd you like it if both our names had Jackson on the end?" my line would be, "Since you been asking our good friends how'd you like it if both our names had Hindin-Miller on the end?"

NB: I write that without cringing.

This is one of my favorite songs to play at the end of the night when there are a bunch of late-twenties-or-30-something-year-olds in the room and they want a singalong dripping in the nostalgia of their teen years spent driving around listening to soft r'n'b and rap songs that they'd burned on CDs.

I can't really explain it.

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Famous Blue Raincoat by Leonard Cohen

Continuing the theme of melancholia, Famous Blue Raincoat by Leonard Cohen is one of those songs I sometimes force people to sit silently and listen to, which is both hypocritical because I wouldn't like it much if someone did that to me, and justified because it's that good.

It starts off in the middle of a cold night and Leonard Cohen is living on Clinton Street in the Lower East Side just a few blocks from my actual apartment here in New York and he's singing a letter he's written to the new lover of his ex. The new lover is someone Leonard Cohen obviously knows extremely well, but instead of rage or malevolence he seems to have accepted what's happening with a weary resignation.

My Dad used to play a lot of Leonard Cohen at home when I was growing up but I rediscovered this song in 2016 and then listened to it on repeat after my ex and I broke up in the winter of 2017. It was the perfect song to blast in my headphones with my hood up while walking around in the freezing cold feeling devastated. I say blast but it's quiet contemplative folk music so I just liked when his voice drowned out the sounds on the street.

I like lyrics. I like to learn them and I like to think about what the singer is really saying. There are references to Scientology, "That night you planned to go clear. Did you ever go clear?" and the raincoat in question was apparently a Burberry jacket he wore and loved for years. This song has one of the most powerful lines I've ever heard and it nails me every time I hear it.

"And thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes I thought it was there for good so I never tried."

God damn.

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Your Silent Face by New Order

That god damn synthesizer does it for me every time. I don't know if I was really conscious of how much I loved Your Silent Face by New Order until two weeks ago when I went to watch The Goldfinch, which features the song in its soundtrack — and which also happens to have been the sixth-lowest-earning-film to open on 2500 screens in cinematic history — but I was sitting there in my chair and the beat started and I immediately Shazammed it, was like, oh it's New Order, and got told off by the elderly woman sitting next to me for distracting her with the light from my screen. My bad. For the record the movie was long and unwieldy and difficult to appreciate especially seeing as I was such a fan of the book, but if you haven't read the book you might like it. Hard to say.

But anyway, walking around the city like a loner listening to melancholic music is one of my favorite pastimes, and sitting in airports listening to sad songs is a lifelong obsession, and over the past two weeks I spent a disproportionate amount of time walking around alone and then I flew to Paris and back, so Your Silent Face got played approximately 87 times in 14 days. This is not an exaggeration.

I don't really know what the song is about, but the instrumentation is moody and the lyrics are delivered in such a sardonic, deadpan way that it kind of reminds me of a musical answer to Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis, and I was listening to Novacane by Frank Ocean a lot at the same time and there seems to be a stylistic correlation there too. Something about not very nice things presented without any form of judgement or malice.

"You've caught me at a bad time, so why don't you piss off."

I was listening to it while driving to Charles de Gaulle to fly back to New York yesterday and I snapped this photo:

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Close To Me by The Cure

It makes sense to start with Close To Me by The Cure; I have it tattooed on my chest, I want it played at my funeral, and the slowed down Closer Mix from All Mixed Up featured on every makeout mixtape I ever made when I was a teenager. My friend Dale introduced me to The Cure when I was 13 or 14 and I've claimed them as my favorite band ever since. A couple of years later a young guy I knew passed away unexpectedly and they did play this at his funeral. That's where I got the idea.

I've only seen The Cure live in concert once, in New Zealand sometime around 2009. They played a three hour set, two and a half hours of which were elongated versions of their gothic B-sides. They didn't play Close To Me. I was pretty disappointed.

In the original version, I love how they make a dance song out of a lyric that conjures the desperation and anxiety that comes with a crush: "I've waited hours for this, I've made myself so sick, I wish I'd stayed asleep today." In the Closer Mix I love the flute, the confidence to keep an intro going for one minute and 23 seconds before Robert Smith starts singing, and the way it reminds me of the obsession I felt for a girl whose name started with M when I was 15 and didn't even own a cellphone.

If I die, you know what song to play.

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