
If I had a teenage daughter, I would give her this playlist to educate her on the music her mama was steeped in through her college years.
I would tell her how I went away to college naively listening to only The Beatles and The Smiths and how a whole world of music was opened up to me in my friends’ living rooms and crusty punk venues and without a lick of help from the internet (which wasn’t more than aol at that point). I would tell her how “make out club” blew my mind because it felt just like love at 19 and how my friend Suzanne and I had to sneak in through the side doors of the Florida Theatre’s Pavement show in 1994 because even though I had bought our tickets for it, I had lost them the week before in the mess of my dorm room. I would tell her about driving halfway across the country after I graduated, listening to nothing but Modest Mouse and Low and Sunny Day Real Estate and about driving to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings park in the sticky hot summers listening to Built to Spill with my friends and singing every song as loud as possible because surely, “there’s nothing wrong with love.” I would tell her how Guided by Voices played the longest show I’ve ever been to (still to this day) and it felt like we were all in on the party with them, even if I had to be at work at 7 the next morning. And I would tell her how even though “this one is different because it’s us” is really from the 80’s and not the 90’s, the sentiment is accurate for these songs that have become the foundation for all the music I listen to and love now.
This musical building block would be my gift to her.
Teenage Girl Playlist
- Make Out Club – Unrest
- Haywire – Bedhead
- Skull – Remastered – Sebadoh
- Seed Toss – Superchunk
- Throwing Things – Superchunk
- I Don’t Want To Get Over You – The Magnetic Fields
- Words – Low
- Every Shining Time You Arrive – Sunny Day Real Estate
- Nightswimming – R.E.M.
- Lord Kill The Pain – Red House Painters
- Sorry Again – Velocity Girl
- Might – Archers Of Loaf
- As We Go Up, We Go Down – Guided By Voices
- Fourth of July – Galaxie 500
- Pancake Cleaner – Swirlies
- Only Shallow – My Bloody Valentine
- Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space – Spiritualized
- Slow Nerve Action – The Flaming Lips
- Shady Lane / J vs. S – Pavement
- Sideshow By The Seashore – Luna
- Three-Dee Melodie – Stereolab
- Sleepwalking (Couples Only Dance Prom Night) – Modest Mouse
- Twin Falls – Built To Spill
Great article! I find it fascinating that we are the same age and that my playlist would be completely different from that era!