hold on, sweet talkin' woman

hi, hi, hi, hi there

Hot fun in the summertime.

Greetings yet again, from me and my new sunglasses. (They were $16 and came from Torrid, if you’re wondering.)

I am paradoxically both a creature of summer and an indoor kid (read: a Gemini), so I’ve been trying to make more of an effort to Enjoy The Outdoors. Luckily, California’s one of the best places in the world to do that. Within a few minutes’ drive of me is the San Gabriel Valley, and the sight of honest-to-goodness mountains is a thing I will never get used to, much less get tired of.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to a summer with all sorts of outdoor plans — a couple of shows at the Hollywood Bowl, a jaunt to the Orange County Fair, a trip to Palm Springs with my mom, the Rose Bowl Flea Market, Disneyland, a Dodgers game, coffee and meals and writing and reading outside… you know what? I’m into it.

Do you have any exciting outdoor plans this summer? Tell me! I want to hear all about it.

what’s living rent-free in my head this week

Spotify’s On Repeat playlist and dopamine rush moments in music

This newsletter is a living testament to all the weird things I find myself thinking about, and my particular flavor of neurodivergence (greetings from obsessive-compulsive personality disorder land!) lends itself to spirals within my thinking. Sometimes those spirals are destructive, and I’m not one of those people who’s walking around talking about how OCPD’s “my superpower” (ick). It has downsides that I take medication for! But the thing that I do find useful about my brain chemistry is how easily it lends itself to analysis and macro thinking. I do think on some level that it’s made me a better writer — leaning into my own curiosity about how and why I think about things has spurred me to do the same about, well, everyone and everything. (This is also where I should put in a plug for therapy. It’s great, in case you haven’t heard.)

Sometimes when I’m considering topics to dive into here, I have concrete things on deck ready to go. (Last week’s look at “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” is a good example of this.) Other weeks — usually when I’m in the middle of a couple of projects like I am right now — the inside of my head is like a jar half-full of marbles, with the air around the marbles being taken up by my creative work, and the marbles themselves being the kind of diffuse rhetorical nonsense that lives in there permanently. You know, the deep, important things, questions like “Was Rod Serling actually hot or do I just respect his storytelling authority?”¹ or “Which of the Beatles maps onto which of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?”² or “If the radio station during the instrumental break of Starship’s ‘We Built This City’ is ‘looking out over the Golden Gate Bridge’ at the ‘city by the bay’, does that imply that San Francisco was built on rock and roll?”³

Sometimes when I’m in these jar-o’-marbles brain moments, I find myself burrowing into Spotify playlists for inspiration, and if I’m in a particularly tight brain-spiral moment, I’ll rely on my On Repeat playlist (the one that Spotify autogenerates of your 30 currently most played tracks), which then becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy as I listen to *only* that.

Spotify won’t let you share your On Repeat directly (maybe wisely, to avoid self-incrimination?), but I duplicated the current lineup as a static playlist to give you a sense of where my head is at the moment. (A lot of this is research, and much of the rest is just obsession spun out of research.) In any event, this is a list of bangers and I stand behind it.

Sometimes, though, the spiral gets even tighter, and my obsession isn’t with a set of songs — it’s with a single section of a song. Sometimes it’s a particularly satisfying chord progression, sometimes it’s that everything drops out but one or two elements and something just pops, sometimes it’s just a shimmering moment of brilliant production. Whatever it is, it triggers something chemical in my brain that I wish I could bottle and sell — it’s that powerful. Here’s a sampling of five songs where I find myself looping individual segments (and the segments themselves):

First, from this week’s On Repeat, there’s a little section in Paul McCartney’s “Coming Up” (1980) where the percussion gets a little kickier for all of like five seconds around the 2:26 mark (handclaps always do. me. in.) Also: this entire video is bananatown if you’ve never seen it before, I highly recommend watching the whole thing.

The “this boy’s life among the electrical lights” section of the New Pornographers’ “Mass Romantic” (2000; starts around 3:06) is a sonic loop I could move into and live in forever. They’re masters of power pop, but the end of the literal first song on their debut album is still the thing that knocks me breathless⁴ — the metronomic fuzz of the guitar! the way the vocals stack on top of each other! It’s a marvel.

There’s something about the chord progression in Sly and the Family Stone’s “Hot Fun In The Summertime” (1969) that liquifies my brain. Every time they hit the phrase “hi, hi, hi, hi there” I feel my dopamine spike so hard I could faint. (I’m not giving you a timestamp because you know you want to listen to the entire thing.)

The production in Hall & Oates’ “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” (1981)⁵ is so bonkers good from beginning to end — each synth layer adds a different texture and when it all comes together, it’s sexy and weird and delicate until it isn’t? It’s delicious, but where I find myself looping back is just the “I… I’ll do anything that you want me to” section that pops up in the pre-chorus (the first instance is cued here, and YouTube told me that, unsurprisingly, this is the most played section of the video):

Lastly, it’s really hard to just give you one example from these guys because so many of their songs have pockets of absolute magic, but at the moment, I am living for the four seconds of ELO’s “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” (1978) starting at 3:13 where everything drops out but the guitar and the bass drum. It scratches an itch I didn’t even know I had, and then it’s gone. Unbelievable.

Is there a tiny section of a song that you can’t get enough of? I can’t be the only person who thinks this way, surely…

what I did this week

This week marked a very important moment in my year: the ceremonial Decorating of the Planner. I’ve done this since high school (possibly even seventh or eighth grade?), and it’s a silly thing that I hold sacred. I transitioned to using the New York Public Library’s Academic Year Planner in college (they discontinued them during the pandemic, the monsters), and then for the last few years I’ve been a big fan of Ink + Volt’s August-July Goal Planner. Yes, I use Google Calendar like a sane 21st century person, but writing it all down too just helps.

Anyway, here’s “Wonderwall”. The continuity of decorating this thing from year to year gives me joy and keeps me in touch with my silliest self, and I hope I never stop.

what’s next?

I am starting guitar lessons THIS WEEK. ACK! (Good ACK!) Think good thoughts for me?

in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog

She makes it hard to get work done but she’s so sweet that I honestly can’t complain.

1. Judge for yourself:

2. Here’s where I think I land on this:

Leonardo = Paul (soulful, bossy)
Raphael = John (anger management issues, yin to Leo’s yang)
Michelangelo = Ringo (resident goof, full of catchphrases)
Donatello = George (the philosopher, looks good in purple)

3. WHAT ELSE COULD IT POSSIBLY MEAN

4. Honorable mention goes to the “so we float through the streets, breathe city lights, claims of the crown forgotten” section of “Miss Teen Wordpower”, another breathtaking loop:

5. I’m so sad about the Hall and Oates feud. I hope those boys figure their shit out before too long!