Early in quarantine, when I was down a YouTube rabbit hole, I stumbled upon the music video for “Once In A Lifetime” by the Talking Heads, and suddenly I was in tears – real blubbery tears. 

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If you’ve seen this music video, you might find this pretty funny – it’s mostly David Byrne dancing erratically in front of a green screen. But in the early days of the pandemic, I found it profoundly moving to hear the lyrics, “You may ask yourself: how do I work this?” while watching a man moving as if he were being battered by gusts of wind. I, too, feel sweaty and disoriented, shocked by a life that I didn’t know would be mine. 

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The thing I love about this song, which I’ve tried to build the rest of the playlist around, is its sense of forward motion in the face of the unknown. The song exists in a state of crisis, but it’s the kind of crisis that makes you open your eyes a little wider and maybe, hopefully, leads to some kind of clarity.  “Time isn’t holding us / time isn’t after us / same as it ever was / letting the days go by”.