I MADE YOU A PLAYLIST, Vol. 20: Heat Index 🌡️
A long-lost postcard from Summer '23
Hi! How are you! I’ve been both literally and figuratively all over the place, and I tried to send you a little something from my travels but all my postcards kept getting lost in the mail.
The last three months have been packed with wonderful, exhausting, beautiful trips/weddings/family adventures, all of which have left me so happy, so full… and more nostalgic than ever for lazy summers when the days were filled with swim practice, book reports, beaded lizard crafts (see below) and DIY tie-dye extravaganzas that ended with splattered shirts scattered across the front yard, drying in the sun before impending thunderstorms. The grass is always greener, I suppose.
We’re gonna keep this one short and sweet, since I’ve only got like four lines or whatever they give you on the back of the postcard, ya know?
LISTEN
Three albums I’ve had in constant rotation:
Calico by Ryan Beatty
Spotify | Apple
Top three: “Bruises Off The Peach,” “Bright Red,” “White Teeth”
Messy by Olivia Dean
Spotify | Apple
Top three: “Dive,” “Dangerously Easy,” “The Hardest Part”
Got Him! by Ethan Tasch
Spotify | Apple
Top three: “Shell,” “Tetherball,” “Present”
Three songs I’ve had on repeat for actual days at a time:
“Mama’s Eyes” by METTE
“Free” by Patrick Droney
“Losing You” by Del Water Gap
READ
Two of my favorite (a.k.a. only) books I read this summer: Happy Place by Emily Henry and Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Highly recommend both.
I also loved this Atlantic piece about Speak Now (Taylor’s Version). It smartly addresses the challenges that come with her re-recorded albums and why this one didn’t quite hit the same as the others released so far. (“Long Live” and “Enchanted” forever, though.)
“Justice for the Teenage Taylor Swift” - Shirley Li (The Atlantic)
“As a result, the uncomfortable reality of rerecording it more than a decade later highlights how time and perspective have inevitably whittled away the sharp edges of those turbulent years.”
“…Swift conjures the disquiet that comes from revisiting the period memorialized by the music of Speak Now. It evokes that feeling of opening an old diary full of entries written at a tricky age and immediately wanting to look away.”
PLAY
I’ve been adding to this playlist in tiny spurts during all the mini heat waves we’ve had this summer, thinking that one day I’d open it up and decide it was finished. That day never really came, but here we are at the end of August smack in the middle of another heat wave (hopefully maybe somewhere close to the last one?), and it just feels wrong to gatekeep this batch of Summer Songs any longer.
Grab a McDonald’s Diet Coke (and a cone, if the ice cream machine is working), take this for a spin, and stay cool 😎 in every sense of the word.
Heat Index
BLOOD AND SUGAR - Boys Like Girls
Ant Pile - Dominic Fike
Hannah (The Sun) - Fred again..
YOLO - Pheelz
Handstand - Miley Cyrus
Disco Man - Remi Wolf
Shadow - Carly Rae Jepsen
Being In Love - Wet Leg
Fever Dreamer - SG Lewis feat. Charlotte Day Wilson
Dive - Olivia Dean
Sunshine Baby - The Japanese House
Chemical - Post Malone
Say Hi - Medium Build
Wild - Carter Faith
Coast - Hailee Steinfeld feat. Anderson .Paak
Tate (how i feel) - Fred again..
All I Really Wanna Do - Devon Gilfillian
Heat Waves - Glass Animals
Rose Colored Lenses - Miley Cyrus
Bodies - Dominic Fike
Lavender Haze (Snakehips Remix) - Taylor Swift
Give It Up For Love - Georgia
I’ve Loved You For So Long - The Aces
Coping on Unemployment - Del Water Gap
Shell - Ethan Tasch
i wanna be your right hand - Nemahsis
Soak Up The Sun - Soccer Mommy
Heart of Gold - Ilsey feat. Bon Iver
no te vayas - Niko Rubio
Do The Dance - Sid Sriram
Listen on Spotify:
That’s all for now! Hope you had/are still having an absolutely fabulous summer. As always, thanks for listening and please PLEASE feel free to send any recs my way.
More soon! ❤️🔥
Natalie