Warm Visions

’95 sedan heat, carpet seats crumbs embedded, pilling flannel under dad’s old coat, arm cast signed xoxo, flattened field, glazed pewter skies, 3pm twilight, turnpike cowboy, fool’s nostalgia, snare shot to heaven, a letter you tucked away from another season.

It’s been a minute, but I felt the inspiration to craft another playlist, pulling from the touches of winter-adjacent autumn and the nostalgia that comes with it, along with three particular songs in the following playlist. In November 2021 I visited my home state of Michigan to visit two family member in the hospital. Alone in my hometown for the first time in 10 years, with a rental car to boot, I drove all over my memory’s landmarks as they were basked in that luscious, midwest fall glow. One of the songs that came on my shuffle was Black Marble’s “Say It First”, and the pairing of listening to this song while driving around my quaint past hometown has stuck with me ever since.

The other two tracks that gave me inspiration were Molly Nilsson’s “1995”, which was an obvious source of past mining thanks to its title and obvious throwback sound. The other was CCFX’s “The One To Wait”, which upon listening explicitly conjures ripe nostalgia of being in friends’ hand-me-down cars in November / December, the heat blaring, the skies fading quick after school lets out, the romance and drama of the holidays swirling, the lackadaisical attitude around responsibilities with winter breaks looming. At the same time though for me, it puts false images in my head of cinematic friend groups of the past doing the exact same thing in suburban, semi-converted rural areas across North America over a stretch of time, let’s say 1986 to 2002. Kids bringing camcorders to school to not only show off their exciting new tech, but to document the best days of their lives. Afternoons just spent driving along the never-ending backroads by the cemetery, or by the trampled corn field, defunct for the winter, or through the four-corner downtown. Putting on their winter coats after a season of hibernation, only to find a love note that a friend had passed them in the early spring of that year, forgotten, wrinkled. Or maybe even a note that was meant to be given, but shrunk away just in the last moment, and then rediscovered. Or perhaps just a love letter to the coats that return to comfort us every year.

With that, I was bound to make a collection of songs with obvious 80s/90s nostalgia production, focusing on synth/drum machine/bass/guitar combos that ` dark, but not too dark you lose hope for the future. Some of the songs lean a bit too hard into the dance / goth portion, but imagine this as a CD (or tape, hey!) you’d find in a car from the era. A windshield-shaped window into an exhibit on ennui, on drama, on being drunk on romance, seeped into every bursting pore. Listen & check the track list below.

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