2024-09: night walks and a new sound

This is the second playlist in the series, the one that came after Ya. Same ritual: a song goes in when it makes me feel something. I broke my own naming scheme and called it “2024-09”, because I started it in September. I came back to “Ya” eventually.

It’s short. Seven songs, about 33 minutes. That’s all of it.

The list

It starts with Daniel Caesar

This was around when I found Daniel Caesar and really got into him, so it makes sense that he’s first. “Always” is slow and warm, a song about devotion, the kind that sounds like it was recorded at 2 a.m.

If I had to guess where it hit me, I’d say walking my dog Lucy at night. That’s when I do my best thinking, and it’s when music really gets to me. Honestly, this whole playlist sounds like those walks: quiet streets, headphones, nobody around.

Wanting love, in every version

Almost everything after that is about love from a different angle.

Choker’s “Rocket” is hazy and floaty, more of a mood than a story. Omar Apollo’s “Ice Slippin” is about a relationship gone cold (he’s said it’s about frosty relationships). Berhana’s “Grey Luh” is chasing love after a few drinks; you might know it from Atlanta. Joji’s “Gimme Love” is the most direct ask on the list. It starts out upbeat, then the beat switches and it gets slower and more inward in the second half.

Devotion, coldness, drunk hope, asking outright. I didn’t plan that, but it’s four ways of saying the same thing.

Frank Ocean in the middle

“Nikes” opens Blonde, and it’s right in the center here. Frank’s voice is pitched up and blurry, and the song is about chasing things that don’t fill the hole. There’s a lot of loss under the surface of that album. It’s the one song here that feels like it’s about more than one person.

It ends on what happens after

The last song is Noname’s “Shadow Man”, with Smino, Phoelix and Saba. It’s about death: what you want people to say, and how you want to be remembered when you’re gone. It’s gentle and almost sweet about it, which somehow makes it hit harder.

“Ya” ended on “Just Breathe”. This one ends on a song about being gone. I’m not sure what that says, but I notice it.

What I notice now

This is where the sound changed. “Ya” was almost all rock and singer-songwriter stuff from the 1990s and 2000s. Every song here is R&B or soul from the last decade, 2016 to 2023. This is the turn where I stopped reaching back and started finding things.

Every artist shows up once. In “Ya”, one song would hit and I’d go back to that artist for another. Here nobody gets a second song. It reads like exploring, not going home.

There’s always an artist I’m discovering. Here it’s Daniel Caesar. In 2025 it would be Mac Miller. I didn’t notice that pattern until I lined these up.

It’s night music. Falsetto, reverb, washed-out vocals, nothing loud. This is a playlist for walking the dog after dark, which is exactly what I think I was doing.

This is where this blog started. Around the time I made this playlist, I first had the idea of going back through these and writing about what they say. I don’t know why this playlist stopped at seven songs. But I like that the idea showed up here.

Next came Ya ’25.

Yes, AI helped write this. No, it has never walked a dog at night. Claude handled the drafting; I handled the songs, the walks, the edits and the deeply normal urge to explain my music taste to the internet.