E.R.A. - 2007/09
Introducing Exactly Right Around: playlists of songs from certain periods of my life
Stream E.R.A. - 2007/09 Exclusively on Apple Music.
Matthew Perpetua, the man who gave us Fluxblog, the mp3 blog back when I was in college, has made a ton of really great playlists. So he inspired me to do try and do something, to dig back into my psyche, to revisit a strange time in my life. With that I introduce you to E.R.A. or Exactly Right Around, a series of playlists filled with songs from certain periods of my life.
For this maiden voyage, we look at the years 2007-2009. I was fresh out of college and fresh to a new city, Boston. I had accepted my first job in the music industry the day before graduating in December 2006, packing up my college apartment and just living out of boxes and suitcases for a few weeks at home before my parents drove me up to my first home away from home. There’s songs on here that for years I just couldn’t listen to anymore: it reminded me of a time I didn’t care to remember. Even though that was the case, I can still vividly remember walking from my apartment on the corner of Pond and Centre Streets in Jamaica Plain, down Green Street to my nearest T stop on the Orange Line, with “Rotten Hell” and “Master Of None” on repeat (the latter was my most played song for awhile in iTunes). I can remember the summer of 2008, being back at my parents after Lollapalooza, watching Grizzly Bear perform “Two Weeks” on Letterman on a loop for hours as it became my favorite song of all-time. There’s songs from mixes I made back then, there’s songs of bands I saw once and barely thought of since.
There’s no real sequence to this. Early on in building it, I laid out the first five songs and the last three songs with the intent of laying out a path from "Two Weeks” to “Children”. Maybe that is what would make it an actual playlist, and I am one who is keen to build a sequence, but I have decided to let that go, to let you, the listener, to choose their own adventure and just hit shuffle and see what happens. At 101 songs and nearly seven(!) hours, I figured this was the best way to go about it. Maybe you’ll discover a song you’ve never heard before, or rediscover one yourself.
Are there any songs from 2007-2009 that you were obsessed with, or invoke a certain memory? What song from that era can you still listen to on repeat, and are there any you don’t want to be bothered with ever again?