calvert - The First

The first playlist I built I titled "Lonesome Road." The music I'd been able to rip before heading off to Vietnam had been through my friend, D., whose taste in music runs across the spectrum. Given the time crunch prior to my departure (I purchased my iBook less than a week before flying out of DC), I was forced to choose music that I recognized, mostly through him. So, the first music to be loaded into my iTunes was pretty basic, folksy stuff. Examples: Bruce Springsteen (who, for reasons of nostalgia, remains my favorite artist), Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, the Pixies, Lucinda Williams, Radiohead, Gov't Mule, Widespread Panic, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, Neil Young, Pavement.

I began building the playlist in a small hotel in Hoi An, Vietnam, midway up the coast. I'd been on the road for less than three weeks by then, but I was already feeling a little homesick and heartsick from all that alone time. My job was to move from town to town, slowly up the coast, by bus, updating information on hotels and restaurants, and adding little tidbits I found along the way. I had an open-ended bus ticket that allowed me to get off in each town, stay a few days, then re-board and move on. And I couldn't stay in any one hotel more than two nights. Which meant I either had to finish all the work in one town in three days, or stay in two hotels. On the up side: I was writing for an upscale guidebook, so I wasn't slumming it. On the flip side: It was going to take me about 10 weeks, much of it by myself.

Given enough time alone, and any of us will start to feel things a bit more deeply. I remember reading Robert Olen Butler's "A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain" while listening to "Stolen Car" in a small bungalow in a secluded jungle cove in Nha Trang, as the waves smashed the shore outside in the dark, and I felt a bit overpowered and a little insane. I was getting something out of the prose and the music that I don't think I would have taken in another scenario.

This kind of thing was happening often enough that I finally needed to form a playlist. I did it because I was enjoying these overpowering sensations and was creating a line-up of songs to maximize their effect. "Where Is My Mind?" is poignant when you've been in your third Vietnamese city in a week and have seen more hotels and restaurants than you can count. The song really has a place then. Likewise with "Broken Hearted Savior," which, believe me, carries a certain power when played under the right solitary circumstances. Or Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." A sad, sad song to a man out on the road alone. Modest Mouse's "The Stars Are Projectors" can make you feel swallowed up in the enormity of the universe, especially when you are listening to it in a country where you haven't been able to speak native English with anyone for days. And Radiohead's "Exit Music (For a Film)?" You get the idea.

So that's how I built "Lonesome Road," which at the time was the only playlist I really needed. I didn't play it all the time, and I spent a lot of hours with other music. It's just that I never felt like I needed to put anything else into a coherent list. I hadn't listened hard enough to bands enough or songs enough to build other playlists, having never really ascribed music to my feelings in such an organized way. I'm glad I made that list though, because now, in this apartment in cold, grey DC, I can fire it up and be taken back to the solitary tropics--to a warm hotel room in a quiet cove, cooled by a hard-spinning ceiling fan and looking ahead to another night on the road.