Day 3: March 20 - Socially Distant Playdates
Even if you’re stuck inside during a pandemic, everyone needs fun! Today’s playlist is all about play! From Prince and Scandinavia, today’s music inspires us to grab some Legos (and something more illicit in Bob Dylan’s case) and break out our inner kid!
Prince - Play in the Sunshine
This songs just absolutely bangs in the happiest of way. Upbeat, energetic, and virtuosic, Prince is at top form in playful back-and-forths between him and his backing band, leading to some zesty solos. From his overtly-political 1987 album Sign ‘O The Times, this track follows a song about the drug crisis, impending nuclear war, and the ever present fears of apocalypse which ran through the Cold War. Sunshine, through it’s infectious joy, soothes those anxieties. Sunshine would have been a political statement itself to Prince, who abstained from drugs and alcohol and sought more natural sources of joy and ecstasy.
Andrew Norman - A Companion Guide To rome: Benedetto
Written during his tenure as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, The Companion Guide to Rome, a suite for string trio was inspired by Norman’s visits to cathedrals around Rome. This movement features what makes Norman so appealing and successful: hard cuts between flashes of tight rhythms with simple interval content. It’s playful and brilliant and beautiful.
Christian Winther Christiansen - Four Hyper Realistic Songs: Movement 4
I love Christian Winther Christiansen. So much. So very much. Like Norman, Danish composer Christiansen plays (pun intended) with simple materials and tight, characterful rhythms. However, where Norman is loud and with attention of a 5-year old in a McDonalds playpen (in a good way), Christiansen sticks with one thing that is obscured until the very faintest reveal, which feels both intimate and cataclysmic. The reveal here is one his most delightful and makes me so stupidly happy each time.
Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen - Plateaux : IX. En Majeur
Another Dane, but from an earlier generation, Gudmundsen-Holmgreen is the class clown of twentieth-century classical (niche title there). This is the final movement of his piano concerto, a suite of character pieces like all the others today. Plateaux, however, is clever and cheeky in that it ostensibly culminates in a movement titled Composition. But that is not the actual end. Instead, Gudmundsen-Holmgreen breaks out this sudden fantasy on a small section of Mozart. Jokes are very, very niche in classical music.
Bob Dylan - Rainy Day Women #12 & 35
At the height of his fame in 1967, Bob Dylan showed up to a studio in Nashville full of local session musicians and asked, “So, what do you guys do for fun?” A not insignificant amount of drugs and alcohol later, they recorded this drunk and stoned tune with the drummer so out of it, he played on the floor, unable to stand, hitting the bass drum with a stick.