Very Specific Playlists is a weekly feature in which Jezebel staffers make very specific Spotify playlists based on their weird proclivities.
I need to be alone. In a city like New York, the only time I truly feel like I get it is when I’m running, headphones in, on a Saturday morning long run, so early in the morning that at another time in my life, I would just be stumbling home from a bar. No demands except my own, no crowds, the day too young to be strewn with garbage. Sometimes I imagine running all the way up the Hudson River path, past the Upper West Side, past Inwood, and then still up, along the river until the city is gone.
Music is an essential part of these runs, but assembling a running playlist requires the same care and frustration as finding the right pornographic film. Sometimes, something has all of the elements that usually gets me off—say, men with hairy forearms and tattoos or aggressive lyrics over an insistent beat—but just doesn’t do the trick, and I scramble to my browser’s back button, the “next” button on my Spotify playlist, the itch unscratched. I can’t pretend that the songs that really do it for me when I’m trying to chew up some miles (that’s what I’ve started to think of running as, chewing them up) will do it for you. But these are my Saturday morning mainstays right now.
Listen to this playlist on Spotify here.
1. Talking Heads “Once In a Lifetime” (Live, from Stop Making Sense)
In Jonathan Demme’s concert film Stop Making Sense, Talking Heads’ performance of “Once in a Lifetime” opens with an uninterrupted four-minute-long shot of a sweaty and bespectacled David Byrne doing his best revival tent preacher. The film suddenly cuts to a side shot of backup singers Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt bent eerily backwards, baptized by stage lighting. I’ve always loved this song, but after I saw that film, I started thinking of it as a hymn for agnostics. I started running right around the time I stopped being Catholic, and listening to this song reminds me of entering a Catholic sacristy and dipping my hand in holy water. It inspires and confuses me.
2. Calvin Harris ft. Haim, “Pray to God”
Calvin Harris irritates me as a public figure and Taylor Swift boyfriend, but this song is a perfect example of a the Platonic Ideal of a running song— steady beat, disciplined build, cathartic release. Haim’s cool-girl steez is pushed to its limit, the repeated line “I give in” matches me stride for stride.
3. Ghostface Killah “The Champ”
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