This week on v/m , we’ve got five songs to cultivate the last remaining rays of sun so we can hunker down for the winter in peace. It’s also a trip to that forgotten corner of your mind.
Welcome to ‘Autumnal Nostalgia’.
Like the memories that come swirling from the smell and taste of an evocative glass of wine, the petrichor of rain or decaying leaves, music can very much be a transporting tool, an agent of nostalgia.
These songs serve as tools and guides to remember those forgotten places.
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v/m is a newsletter designed around themed playlists & short-form writing.
We gather five songs and organize them to mirror the progression of a day: morning, noon, afternoon, evening, and late night.
We provide background and lyrical insights to enhance your listening experience and highlight moments that can be elevated with the music.
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Song on the Beach
Arcade Fire , Owen Pallett
Her (2021)
We’re opening strong on the nostalgia front. Here comes the tears.
From the soon to be classic, Her by Spike Jonze, we get a tender human moment that is intended in film to be written by AI.
Of course it’s not made by AI but by Owen Pallett and William Butler of Arcade Fire, and this amazing piano tune is laden with longing and loss, just like forgotten jewels in a trash heap or river of tears.
It is no wonder that this composition was the longest to write for the duo when working on the original soundtrack of Her. The immediate nostalgic flood produced by this composition will both sit you down and lift you up. A nostalgia of a particular melancholic but loving type: the longing to be physically close to somebody you love whilst on the phone with each other.
"I'm trying to write a piece of music that's about what it feels like to be on the beach with you right now."
Much like nostalgia itself, and all of the songs in this list, there is a complexity in this seemingly simplistic composition, like the water that makes up the waves and each sand particle that makes up the beach.
I’ll Be Seeing You
Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday (1957)
Nostalgia
a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.
The irrecoverable condition. The trick of the mind that forces us to remember the past more positively and regret the possible future we could have had.
What love could inspire such sentimental yearning? A collection of memories stored in a mutual trust, that’s what it feels like to listen, wondering where does the memory end and the myth begin?
Billie Holiday’s voice is now most likely forever cemented as a sort of “American Nostalgia”: her voice and delivery being one of our national treasures. The lightness and brevity of her inflections sound of truth and love, painting a picture of nostalgic longing and “all the familiar places”, reminding us of the loves we’ve lost, the faces we’ll always see “in the morning sun”.
This kind of missing someone, the kind where everything reminds you of them, is always bittersweet and Holiday’s I’ll Be Seeing You exemplifies these feelings truly.
This must be what a tree feels like when it loses its leaves in the fall.
One of John’s favorites, this placid ballad is an ode to one of the greatest cities on earth.
It’s an ode to feeling and being alone, yet paradoxically constantly surrounded by millions of people. An ode to the people that make up the very fabric of the streets—those windows of souls crowded in bars, restaurants, trains, stoops, and the sidewalks. An ode to the proverbial roses that grow in, and in spite of, the concrete.
This place is home, this place is hell. Home of the juxtapositions, the contradictions and the oppositions. Our dreams and our nightmares, our friends and our enemies, our lovers and our haters. The city that never sleeps, and always eats. The Concrete Jungle. The city that is and always will be—the city that was and the city it will become.
This song is an ode to us New Yorkers and our love-hate relationship to the city that has built us and made us into the people we are.
Doomed
Moses Sumney
Aromanticism (2017)
This composition will break you down. Make you cry. Make you forgive yourself.
You will need to sleep on this one and let the subconscious work.
This simple arrangement will have you in a complex knot of emotions, so heavy and twisted you might actually be doomed. You might need a nap, and a doctor should look at you as you will be sick from the weight of the water of life.
This is what the last nanoseconds of drowning must feel like.
The serenity of Moses’ voice and the beauty of his poetry is Spirit itself.
This is prayer of the utmost sacred kind: soliloquy of the most holy variety.
Mentions of God notwithstanding, this composition is religious—reverent and humble, human and honest. The kind of song that reaches the inner workings of what it means to love, what it means to be loved, and what it means to truly love oneself.
Somber as it is, there is a nostalgia in the moment Moses chooses to share with us. First, in the moment itself: the points in our lives when we experience these raw reflections and secondly, in the release these moments provide, as we “expel” these “mortal shell[s]” from our beings.
There are never ending waves of nostalgia of the constant conscious, subconscious, and unconscious questioning at the heart of what it means to be human from beginning to end.
Blue in Green
Miles Davis Sextet ft. John Coltrane and Bill Evans
Kind of Blue (1959)
There isn’t much to write for this. Let’s just let it be.
Close out your day with a classic, played by arguably some of the greatest musicians and jazz artists of all time.
Thanks for reading & listening!
As always, we appreciate you taking the time to listen, read, and explore with us. Music is a journey, and we’re glad to have you along for the ride. We hope today’s playlist not only adds a little rhythm to your day but also sparks a few new discoveries along the way.
Until next time, keep your mind open and that curiosity alive.
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