Is this playlist for me?
If you enjoy any of the following, this playlist may be worth checking out:
- Pop music with a driving beat that opens up in expansive choruses, like the catchiest pop songs of the early to mid-1980s.
- Melody. These songs have big, carefully crafted melodic hooks with intricate rhyme schemes.
- Nostalgia. These songs not only evoke a specific era through the use of instruments, song-construction and production, but they capture something essential about nostalgia itself as a mood, with its complex mix of joy and poignancy, presence and absence.
The songs in this playlist evoke the distinctive feeling quality you get when you’re at a crossroads in life, like graduating from high school or moving out for the first time. There’s a mix of excitement about what’s to come, along with bittersweet sadness about what you’re leaving behind. These songs capture a mood that is simultaneously exuberant and poignant.
If I were just going to listen to one song, which should I pick?
Tennis Club by Talltale is the song that birthed this playlist and it’s a great place to start because it captures all its essential qualities. If the music of the 1980s had a characteristic feeling quality, I want to say that this song captures it. And what a chorus.
What genres are represented in this playlist?
Pop and indie-pop.
What should I listen for?
Is there a moment in the song where you want to arch your back and reach for the sky like a dancer in the movie Fame? Do you suddenly feel like you’re living inside the closing credits of an 1980s coming of age film? Does the urge to bedroom-dance overcome you while listening? These are signs that you’re getting into the spirit of this playlist.
If I like this playlist, what other ones should I check out?
Snap is similar to Forward in that it’s made up of high-energy, danceable pop songs. But whereas Forward is more sincere and nostalgic, Snap has a swagger to it that borders on cocky. With Forward you have a sense of the “bigness” of life as experienced at a pivotal moment in time; in Snap, you have a sense of the bigness of yourself.
Last Updated on August 1, 2024
