You can't put your arms around a memory

Who you were, who you are, who you will be — a soundtrack to ring out the old year and ring in the new

Our interviews with Nathan Fielder, Sarah Squirm, Cameron Winter and Geese, Adam Sandler, Brendan from Turnstile, Patrick Radden Keefe, MJ Lenderman, Evan Kinori, Maya Hawke, Bon Iver, André 3000, Sandy Liang, Matty Matheson, Laraaji, Ryota Iwai from Auralee, Tyler, The Creator, John C. Reilly, Father John Misty, Kate Berlant, Clairo, Steven Yeun, Conner O’Malley & more are here.

The 2025 Slappy Awards, our year-end excellence celebration, is here.

This was The Jacket’s Year — the 21 best are here.

The B.L.I.S.S. List — a handy rundown of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples, from incense to socks — is here.

Erin threw a holiday party earlier this month with our friends Kelsey and Tessa, here in Oakland at Tessa’s gallery. They hung garlanded boughs of pine from the walls, filled up a wire basket with satsumas, built a pyramid of Ricciarelli (possibly Earth’s Greatest Cookies), dumped a kiloton of Chex Mix into a large bowl, filled steel tubs with cold beverages, and lit a flotilla of candles, with votives wrapped in tin foil and tapers perched before a disco ball.

The s—t turned out wonderfully: A full-fledged Chill Rager.

Chex Mix in a bowl, Satsumas in a cage, garlanded pine, tapered candles with a disco ball, and a shot from upstairs of the first people arriving before the party became an all-out Chill Rager

My (Jonah’s) contribution — aside from the Chex Mix idea and helping to schlep over some cases of wine and some bags of ice — was the playlist.

I was given no guidelines beyond “songs people might like to hear at a party” and so, to assemble the tunes, I decided to do something I’d been meaning to do for a long time. I went back through my entire Shazam history, played a ~minute or so of ~every track I was unfamiliar with and, if it fit the vibe, I tossed it into the playlist.

Did you know that Shazam keeps a record of every song that’s ever caught your ear out in the world to the extent that you held up the app to determine what it was? I knew this, but had never set aside the time to really tuck in and spin through it systematically. I’m very glad I finally had a reason to do just that.

Your boy (center) setting up with Erin (left) & Kelsey (right). Tessa is out of frame getting the lighting dialed in

I’m likely not alone in ranking Shazam up there with the Best of Apps. It’s the rare kind that performs a previously impossible / heretofore miraculous feat, rather than just kind of getting in the way and, on balance, making things stupider.

It’s also the rare kind of app we love here at the Plane for the way it can abet a fuller experience of the real world, rather than estranging you from it.

But it hadn’t fully occurred to me that your Shazam history forms a uniquely fascinating record of personal delight, curiosity and serendipity.

And I hadn’t thought about how, amid all the anxiety people feel these days around Escaping the Algorithmic Echo Chamber, there are worse solutions than curating yourself a playlist of songs whose only common trait is that their enigmatic tones took your interest by surprise while you were living life.

After I set aside those songs that did not strike me as particularly holiday-party-friendly, the final playlist wound up running just over 3 hours and comprising a neat & tidy 41 of the 291 songs I’ve apparently Shazamed since 2014.

The playlist is phenomenal. It made the party a bare minimum of 33.3% more wavier, and I have to believe it will do the same for any party you choose to play it at.

No one genre dominates. The Joubert Singers’ underground disco-gospel epic “Stand on the Word” plays a few songs after Johnny Thunders’s beautifully glammy, bluesy, punky “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.” There is amazing, heavily synthesized 2000s-era Habesha pop; sick, stuttering contemporary Japanese jazz fusion; 1960s Beninese psychedelic rock; two cool examples of weird Wings-era Paul McCartney; and so on…

One such song

Some of these songs I was familiar with, to varying degrees, before I sat down to make the playlist. Others were complete blindspots of mine, as were the artists behind them. “One Note Bossa” is a beautiful droning drum-machine track from the British new-age-ambient guitarist David Horridge, which pairs surprisingly well with a buttery cover of Janet Jackson’s R&B hit “That’s the Way Love Goes” by the ‘90s jazz guitarist Norman Brown. Horridge was apparently heavily influenced by several musicians I f--k with heavy, including Alice Coltrane, John Martyn and Terry Riley, and we’ve kept Brown’s cover in heavy rotation here at HQ ever since the party because it is extravagantly, indulgently, ridiculously tasty.

But aside from the moment I Shazamed these tracks, this was my first time hearing either of these artists — knowingly, anyway.

And that transformed the seemingly simple act of Making a Party Playlist into a poignant and strangely disconcerting experience.

Because, in a way, I — or more precisely, a series of earlier, half-remembered, if not outright forgotten versions of myself — had already made the playlist, without my conscious knowledge, over the course of a decade.

With some songs, I had a sense of where I’d been when they first caught my ear: driving in the dark on the way back from a night with friends, listening to the excellent free-form Bay Area radio station KFJC; at a Gowanus bar during happy hour; watching the DJ before a concert started; at home in front of a Christian Petzold movie; etc. They vaulted me back across the years and into that memory.

With other tracks, though, I had little to no clue where — or, for that matter, who — I’d been at the moment I first heard them. In each case, this version of me ostensibly still lingered somewhere within myself, commemorated by our shared affinity for this song. But I couldn’t tell you a ton about him.

I can think of no better way to ring out this past year than with this playlist. It isn’t just a collection of fantastic music. It also speaks to the truth that we are all busy constantly creating who we are, and — when we look back — creating who we were.

Song to song, year to year, me to me, you to you, our selves aren’t fixed. There might be continuities over time, but the terms remain negotiable.

Among other things, this means we still have a chance to change things, even if it doesn’t always feel like it. And ultimately, chance has nothing to do with it: change comes no matter what.

Here’s to a 2026 full of change for the better.

— Jonah & Erin

The playlist is on cursed Spotify (minus 2 songs not on the platform) here, and slightly less-cursed Apple Music here.

Feel free to put this on at any holiday parties you host or attend this week. And, of course, feel free to dig through your Shazam history & make your own.

Check out our monumental new list of the 50 Slappiest Shops across the Spyplane Universe.

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