Gameplaylist — An Object You Cannot Lose
Sam Martone
The songs on this playlist are not, by and large, directly related to video games (although the opening to Man Man’s “Knuckle Down” certainly calls to mind 16-bit dungeon trawling). Instead, this is just a set of songs I listened to a lot around when I started work on An Object You Cannot Lose. It was my first year living in Arizona. I played Bon Iver’s second album nonstop while I wrote, due to the way its shimmering music and mostly indiscernible lyrics made for sprawling background soundscapes. I watched the “Oblivion” video over and over again for the moment at 0:41 when Grimes so earnestly lets a cautious spectator know it’s okay for him to walk in front of the camera. My initial disappointment in the simplicity of the new Rihanna single quickly changed to euphoric excitement anytime it came on the radio as I drove to friends’ apartments and movie theaters, anywhere to get away from the crushing heat. These songs are all objects I can’t lose, artifacts of that first year in this concrete desert, when I was just getting to know the people and places I’d grow to think of as home, or a kind of home, over the subsequent years. I hope listening will maybe pull you back to 2011-2012, to the memories you may carry tangled up with these songs. Or, if they’re new to you, I hope one might mean as much to you now as it did to me then.
- Bon Iver—“Perth”
- Cults—“Abducted”
- Gotye—“Eyes Wide Open”
- Metric—“The Void”
- Grimes—“Oblivion”
- 2NE1—“I am the Best”
- Man Man—“Knuckle Down”
- St. Vincent—“Cruel”
- Lana del Rey—“Born to Die”
- Jay Z & Kanye West—“Primetime”
- Band of Horses—“Dilly”
- James Blake—“The Wilhelm Scream”
- Major Lazer—“Get Free”
- Beach House—“Lazuli”
- Rihanna—“We Found Love”
Via Spotify and/or Rdio!