Since bidding a fond farewell to the Apple Store last Friday (until next June, anyway), I’ve managed to occupy myself with two principal activities: baking, and perfecting my “breakup” playlist. Both are extremely delicate tasks.
As for the first, the whole project was spawned by a bunch of bananas I had sitting around that were about to go bad. Not wanting to throw them out, I found a Food Network recipe for banana bread and had at it. Having never baked anything before on my own in my entire life, the extremely positive reception of the banana bread at work started something of a frenzy. (In retrospect, I think that I could have served dog food on a plate, and my coworkers would have received it equally positively; everyone at Apple likes free food.) A week later, I’ve made the banana bread twice, a batch of good-but-not-amazing oatmeal raisin cookies, and a red velvet cake that tasted incredible but looked like a huge pile of crap. Baking, it turns out, is awesome.
The second occupation — the breakup playlist — has been an ongoing project of mine for the last five or six years. My stress-reducing activity of choice is reorganizing my iTunes library, so making playlists is something I do fairly often. And while I’ve never had a breakup dramatic enough to actually warrant an all-night bout of crying and playing the Virgin Suicides soundtrack on repeat, the breakup playlist has always struck me as a staple of every functional music library.
This time around, I set myself a few ground rules — all songs have to be lyrically linked to relationships or breaking up; no artist may appear more than once — and put together an entirely new playlist. The full version (available for download at the bottom of the entry) is 30 tracks, but here are the 10 highlights:
“Dry Your Eyes” — The Streets
“Don’t Turn Around” — Ace of Base
“Crown of Love” — Arcade Fire
“My Interpretation” — MIKA
“Before He Cheats” — Carrie Underwood
“Don’t Speak” — No Doubt
“She’s A Rejector” — Of Montreal
“Irreplaceable” — Beyoncé
“How’s It Going To Be” — Third Eye Blind
“Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” — Stars
I originally had planned on structuring this playlist around the five stages of grief/loss, but that ended up being sort of disjointed. (Feel free to reorganize the playlist according to that, if you want. I’d be curious to see if anyone can make it work.) Ultimately, I think I captured what I’d be thinking — and the order in which I’d be thinking it — pretty well. Thoughts and additions are, of course, appreciated.
Download! (244MB)