Playlist for The Gingerbread Forest

 

 

I should have called this the Gray Haired Old Lady Music Blog. But when I set up the Blogger blog a few days ago, I was in a very surly mood and did not care to take any time to give this a fancy or accurate moniker. So I just picked Music Blog. But then today, the right name came to me like an Angel. More on that later.

 

To start off I picked Blogger as a tool so I that didn't have to bother with a vanity URL and so that I could hearken back to a time when the Internet wasn't a cesspool of evil brokenness. Kind of like zines do one step back. I actually forgot how crappy Blogger is, how awful the features are, how god-awful the HTML is under the hood and how I can only upload images if I use Blogger in the Firefox browser. Something about safety settings but it's always something. Just like how nothing online works anymore. 

 

And here I must confess I have other blogs. Which is a socially awkward thing to admit in the year 2026. I have a Cher blog, which might be an automatic turn-off for music lovers out there who take their music so seriously they can't tolerate opinions from pop music fans. 

 

But to that I say don't let the back door out of here give you any trouble. I'll even help you wrest it open for your speedy escape. I am NOT in the mood. In fact, I am in a very bad mood. I am in a post-manosphere/Rape-Academy mood. And I am not interested in any anti-Cher Bro-thoughts at this time. You can go fuck off to the fucking off with all of that.

 

I just want to build a little corner here and be left to it. So kindly...

Anyway, as I was saying, I have a Cher blog (and a sister site), which has honestly served me very well over the years. The Cher fans are great and very supportive; and since I've been doing those two things since back to 2007 (and 2000 respectively), I have built something fans seem to like. I've even made a small amount of conversions. I've met some good meat space friends and other music writers. 

 

But unfortunately, I can't write about other brands of music there. It's very niche.

I also have a poetry blog called Big Bang Poetry. And I can't write about music there either. The poets I know care as little about pop music as the pop-music makers I know care about poetry in its academic sense. There are notable exceptions to this but that still seems to be the general rule. 

 

And I would even ague that poets can be the worst of the two sides, what with their aggravated outcast-ness, their chipped shoulders of perceived uncool-ness and their being the most territorial of their small and very undervalued spaces. Poets I know often have contempt for anything remotely...what is the word? Undead? No, that's too harsh. Unacademic? No. Known? I don't know. Anything that would be on the radio I guess. 

 

Which is largely why they didn't like it (as a group) when Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize in Literature. Maybe I can resurrect some of that controversy here later.

 

But poets are also my people. So I can't be too upset with them. Although I am now worried a few might be incels. This is not a thought I would have had before last week. I went from being a "not all men" kind of person a week ago to a "you know, I'm not really sure anymore" kind of person today.

 

But regardless, I have also been writing about specific songs on Social Media platforms but that has been somewhat unsatisfying.

Facebook fan pages are fun and although it's very nice to have conversations with other fans (and read what artists have to say), it is not a long-form sandbox by design. It's also not a figure-it-out kind of space and can be plenty territorial not just between other fans but from the artists themselves or their handlers. For example on one fan page I like, I've had more posts rejected (Facebook's term not mine) or held in purgatory for days (that one's mine) than is comprehensible considering their content. And if you spend too much time trying to figure out why some things are "good" topics and others are "bad" ones, well your brain is working on the wrong thing (a popularity thing). Which is not good use of your brain time.

 
Bluesky is a nice asylum for those of us who had to leave Twitter. I've been posting ad-hoc playlists there (like I once did on Twitter). But that platform is primarily political and not as generalized yet. Maybe in time. Plus that media is not a long-form space either. And social media is very ephemeral. I often find myself asking myself, "what harebrained thing did I say about that song?" and I can't even search for it efficiently because it's part of social media's ever-disappearing past.

 

Similarly, I started writing on Substack last year which has been a good catchall for non-Cher, non-poetry musings (which I very much like about it) but it's just that, miscellaneous. I write about my family there or culture-at-large but I don't want my Substack feed taken over by this project to have my peace about music.
 

And besides, I have a more aggressive purpose here I can just feel it. I can't say this enough. I'm a different person on the other side of last week's news. The Rape Academy story was explained to me last Monday by pastor John Pavlovitz and was published in The Kansas City Star. I was in a hotel room in Collinsville, Missouri (the town of the world's largest catsup bottle, the ancient Cahokia Mounds site and the self-proclaimed world producer of horseradish) as I was driving back from a family event in Cleveland. Like Pavlovitz says in his Op Ed, the story was an "an atomic bomb to the psyche." And I have not been able to successfully communicate this to my loved ones.
 

I am very pissed off in a way that I hope lasts a very long time. And after years of bad personal and national news, the story just didn't land the way all that other bad news has landed on me. 

 

It's been years of seeing cautionary signs about sex trafficking or rather sex slavery (let's call a spade a spade here) posted on the back of doors of stalls in womens bathrooms at every rest stop and truck stop across the country. It's been decades of incel manifestos written before mass shootings. Decades of avoiding online trolls and reading about sexually graphic death-threats and doxings against, quite frankly, stronger ladies than me. 

 

But now (brave new world) I'll never be safe in my own home again, that safe haven from the screwed-up world, that home that loves, the home of love itself. Never. Again. Because betrayal is as easy as a camera in your phone, an Internet connection, a bad argument and an easily-dismissed vow to your God.
 

It's a blow big enough to make me feel stronger in some non-intuitive way. In a way that is much less willing to stop talking about itself and about music. In the past, these things have just made me want to lay low. But you know what? I've lived a long life. Most of it has been good. This has made me happily ready to hang up my courtship hat. (Even B.O.B. is getting the cold shoulder.) I have no patience for bullshit boys right now. Because who can you trust? Can you even trust yourself? 
 

So I was in the middle of that road trip last week when the news hit me, like I said, and over the next two days this kind of really angry resilience seeded itself in the form of making playlists. 

 

One of the best things about a road trip is the opportunity to listen to music all day long in the car and I had both my Sirius and my husband's Spotify to bounce between. Making playlists and mixtapes has always inspired me over the years, from trading cassette tapes (and then CDs) with people to sharing curated streaming playlists. Late last year, I attended my local Zine Fest and many of the young kids making zines had handwritten or typeset playlists on their final pages. 

 

There's something important about playlists and mixtapes that I can't put my finger on. It has something to do with our early communities and identities and asserting our moods. Or maybe that it's outside of, and in challenge to, the commodification system. Maybe I'll figure it out here. 

 

Just like everything else we have to figure out now. (Put it on the pile.)
 

I know show biz in general and the music world specifically can be seen as yet another kind of unsafe space (here's a fun story) and so my gravitating to music right now is a bit tricky. But I will just have to step carefully through the Gingerbread Forest here. Because music, ironically, is also possibly one of my last remaining mental safe spaces. 

 

Use with caution, the medicine says. 
 

The gloomy and ominous Gingerbread Forest is where we find ourselves right now, a shadowy place with creeps now exponentially scattered behind random trees at regular intervals (1 out of 3 apparently). So not only are we hiding from a possibly un-killable wicked witch (she is supernatural, after all) with a taste for insatiable inhumanity, but we now have to fucking worry about Hansel too. Darkness has arrived. And I seem to have found myself more angry than scared. 

 

Anyway as I said at the start, the blog's name came to me just now like a gift. A friend of mine was talking on Facebook about the cognitive behavior assertiveness skill called Broken Record. According to the Cognitive Behavior Management site:

 

When a record is broken, it repeats the same piece of music over and over again. The key to the broken record technique is persistent repetition in the face of adversity. You will need to remember your legitimate rights if you are not to be manipulated into giving in to individuals whose interests conflict with your own. Occasionally, you encounter people – encyclopedia salesperson, children, or a stubborn friend – who will not take “no” for an answer. When you want to set limits and someone else is having difficulty getting your message, you need to take a stand and stick to it.

This approach is also effective in telling people what you want when their own wishes are preventing them from seeing yours. 

 

So often we are shut down by massively bad behavior, by selfish and cruel people, by ourselves even. Ladies (and friends of ladies), we need to learn be be broken records. 

 

The Press-On Songs

So here is our first playlist from songs I heard streaming in the car on the way home from Cleveland, the Gingerbread Forest Playlist, which naturally and miraculously came to a nice set of 10. Sweet!

 

1. "Ways to Go" by Grouplove
 

And I totally want to sleep all day right now.



 

2. "Light and Day" by The Polyphonic Spree
 

I discovered this song from seeing the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And I was happy to hear it again last week. The Polyphonic Spree often has prompted my search engine queries with the question "is this band a cult" and the Internet-that's-driving-us-all-crazy-and-bad assures me that it is not.


 

 

3. "Life is Long" by David Byrne and Brian Eno

 
"Tigers walk behind me, they are to remind me that I'm lost, but I'm not afraid."

 

 

4. "Don't Stop" by Fleetwood Mac
 

I've been asking all my family and friends to name their Top 10 list of music acts (more on that later) and this is the band that shows up the most on everybody's lists.

This is a perennial chin-up song but it also feels like an endless march sometimes. 

 

 

5. "Get It Right the Next Time" by Gerry Rafferty

"You gotta die a little everyday just to try to stay awake."

 

 

6. "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth) by George Harrison  

 

 "Give me light."

 

   

 

 

7. "Solsbury Hill" by Peter Gabriel  

 

 "Just had to trust imagination."

  

   

 

 

8. "Let It Go, Let It Flow" by David Mason 

 

This probably came up on streaming because Mason died on April 18. 

 

"How it's gonna be when we're gone?" 

 

   

 

 

9. "Riptides" by Death Cab for Cutie 

 

Ok, this one's kind of a downer. I don't know how it got in here. Listen to it and then forget it was included in the list. Being perfect's not the point.

 

  

 

 

 10. "Fighting My Way Back" by Thin Lizzy 

 

 "This kid is going to wreck and ruin and I'm not quite sure of what I'm doing." 

 




And yup, there is a dearth of women in this first playlist, especially considering where my head is at right now. But I was limited to what came up on my listening platforms.

 

Don't worry. We'll redress that before long.