#CurrentMix
July 26, 2026.
When I told my partner I had a new mix in the playlist hopper, I prefaced it with this observation: “This is a weird one.” As soon as it came out of my mouth, I thought, Well, that’s a silly, unhelpful description. All my mixes are pretty weird.
Which they are. (Exhibit A: Mix Archives, where the public-facing mixes I have made since 2020 are housed.) “Eclectic” is about the only adjective that can describe my musical taste without issuing some sort of caveat. Like all mix makers, I have my own idiosyncratic self-imposed rules and constraints, but none are based on genre, tempo, song length, or time period. The release dates of the songs on After the Comet span from 1953 to this month, and several tracks have histories that predate the recordings that appear here by decades. That, too, is probably true of most playlists I put together. Perhaps the most notable historical track here is the reinterpretation of “American Tune” by Rhiannon Giddens and Paul Simon, in which the original lines that anchor the song in the narrative of the U.S. as an immigrant nation have been rewritten to center the concurrent narrative of Black people in the Americas of the early 1600s: the middle passage and of the U.S. as a nation and an economy built on centuries of institutional slavery. Likewise, After the Comet pulls some obscure gems from the vault that too few people know (such as the two outstanding tracks by Love from their 1967 LP Forever Changes), a handful of great tracks from talents I had never heard of three or four years ago (hello, Rosalia, Angine de Poitrine, This is Lorelei, and Doechii), as well as recent or new material from Madonna, Peter Gabriel, Paul McCartney, and Mavis Staples—artists who have been doing their things for 48, 61, 69, and 76 years and counting, respectively, and are still continuing to explore new territory and perform.
What I believe I was trying to express with “weird” was that After the Comet reflects the herky-jerky mood of the last four months. The songs on the mix move from frenetic panic to ecstatic effervescence to poignant melancholy to calming solace and relief and back again. Multiple times.
We live in a time of disorienting extremes, high highs and low lows, often at the same time. Within a four-day span in mid-June, I went from the vet ER to a dear friend’s Pride month drag show to watching the New York Knicks win a championship for the first time since 1973 to visiting my dad after his spinal surgery. Zooming out that lens reveals similarly disparate spaces, signs, and signals. Mid-July brought a memorial and a birthday on the same day. I’m surrounded by a number of folks I love who are grappling with serious health challenges, some of them irreversible tragedies. Which means I’m heartbroken for their suffering and pain and ever grateful every day for my good health and a body that, so far, endures what I try to tackle very well and that I hope continues to respond to my efforts to give it the rest and recovery it deserves and needs. For July 4 weekend, New York City and the East Coast were besieged with severe thunderstorms and flooding for three days, and a number of incredible photographers caught a gobsmacking moment on July 3 when the Statue of Liberty was surrounded by lightening that signaled imminent, torrential downpours and a rainbow at the same time. If that’s not a metaphor for where we are in our national political landscape, I don’t know what is.
Nearly every day seems to be a living reminder that what holds true and feels normal today can and will turn on a dime tomorrow. The flow state of being in daily life, when normal is lightness, is becoming more precious to me very passing day. This week, we finally were blessed with beautiful, clear weather and more importantly, the return of breathable air again. The previous week, New York City and indeed, much of the East Coast was trapped for four days in a heatwave that arrived concurrent to what the news outlets now call a “severe wildfire smoke event.” In June 2023, smoke drift from California wildfires blanketed NYC and the air quality was so hazardous, even staying indoors with the windows shut for four days, I had a massive headache and my apartment smelled like the smoke-saturated aftermath of a building fire. The smoke came from Canada wildfires this time, while the air quality wasn’t quite as toxic as it was in 2023, it still was bad enough that it kept us indoors with the windows closed for the better part of four days. One of many peculiar effects of wildfires is that the sun darkens to intense oranges and reds, as do the sky’s sunrises and sunsets. My brother took the photo below from his apartment balcony on the second day of the smoke siege, which was milder than the first. What strikes me about it is that without any context for the image or its subject matter, it actually looks rather beautiful—like the mystical horizon of another planet or an abstract collage by an esoteric visual artist—and as harmless as the emergence of the aurora borealis on a clear night.
Toxic forces can be both destructive and pretty at once. Long-term recovery and healing processes, both physical and emotional, are often messy and painful. Those paradoxes of being alive are constant enough that we can’t always discern the true, full nature of what we’re experiencing as it’s happening. And now that those contradictions and gaps between perception and actuality have also merged with volatile changes in most facets of day-to-day life, is it any wonder that “normal” is something of a meaningless adjective? Even our planet itself is turbulent, its contents shifting in violent orbital flight with every sunrise and sunset.
That sounds pretty dismal and it mostly is at the panoramic level.
But it’s also true that everything in and on this funny little celestial body called Earth is connected, for worse and for better, including us. Where it concerns the things over which we humans have agency, we have a pretty good idea of what we need to do and the changes and directions we must pursue together to make life on more sustainable for more of us—and ultimately for all of us. All that is neither bad nor good, or perhaps it’s both the bad and good news. Our fortunes as human beings are bound together. The fire in another country thousands of miles from my own home matters. The losses of life and freedoms matter. So do the resonant novel, the piece of art, the song, dance, performance that come from the creative imaginations of souls you may never meet. The minute joys and small gifts of shared laughter, with strangers and loved ones alike, matter. As do the efforts of people who are making sacrifices to fight, to try to right terrible, systemic wrongs, and to reach for peace. All of it matters. I take solace in the capacity of the human heart to hold sorrow and joy and everything else in between at the same time, to carve out spaces of serenity even amidst colossal tempests. I find glimmerings of hope and brightness in all the amazing individuals I see who act with steadfast, purposeful kindness every single day, sometimes on a grand, dramatic scale, but more often in small, ordinary ways that often occur in a flashing moment. I spent this whole weekend with people who brought that out in me. A beautiful birthday gathering for a friend, attended mostly by folks I didn’t know who were wonderful. My partner and our dog, sharing our life and doing everyday things. A long hike at a state park, followed by a shared lunch in perfect weather with breathable air with dear friends of nearly thirty years. Hours spent alone, listening to music and finishing this mix writeup. A lot of joy and dancing and tears and laughter live in all those spaces. Just as they do in these songs.
