Playlists for Life: Wandering
Playlists for Life: Wandering
TBC Selects

Playlists for Life: Wandering

TBC’s Senior Producer crafts a sonic tapestry for aimless enjoyment.

Playlists for Life is a narrative playlist venture from Third Bridge Creative. Each month, a member of our team curates a soundtrack to a pivotal moment in their life, and writes about the circumstances and discovery methods that led them to these particular sounds. You can listen to last month’s playlist here.

Nearly a year ago to the day I was flying into Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. It was my first major international flight and around the 8th hour of 14 I had accepted that we were never landing. I would be trapped in Delta cabin limbo forever. My shrill reaction was mostly due to all of the in-seat flight trackers being out of service. It felt like we were aimless—no flight path, no progress bar, no concrete landing time. I just had to take the flight attendant’s word that we'd make it. 

When I landed, a different kind of wandering began. We arrived at Hamamatsucho Station at 10 PM and used the blush-colored Tokyo Tower to guide us to the hotel. I planned where I was going to sleep every night, but other than that, the day-to-day schedule was nonexistent. It felt more welcoming than anywhere I'd ever found myself. I quickly knew this was the type of roaming I would opt into any day, over and over—the 80+ year old woman on her bike stopping to offer an umbrella as a summer storm roared through Aoyama, the salary man on the Ginza line who sensed I was lost (despite how cool I was trying to play it), the random pop-up market in an empty lot in Jingūmae where I drank habushu shots with strangers (habushu is a liquor from Okinawa with a real venomous snake in the bottle). I was wandering, but pleasantly. 

When I returned I enjoyed telling people that I had just drifted around Tokyo for three weeks. I didn’t go to Golden Gai or Tokyo DisneySea… but I did ride the train everyday for 20+ stops and watched people drift to sleep while I listened to The Wake’s “Melancholy Man” or “nocturne” by early 2000’s-era Korean shoegaze band zzzaam. 

This year I moved to Colorado and have been trying to find that same freedom and welcome wandering. Seeing Peter Cat Recording Co., an indie/jazz/soul band from New Delhi perform “People Never Change” live, and listening to Weather Report while driving up a mountain make me think things are off to a decent start.  This playlist is a soundtrack for a long commute, staring out plane/train/car windows, or for a wandering mind on a quiet work day. 

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