I moved to my present neighborhood in the Lower East Side in spring of 2014, after 9 months subletting with a family of four on 148th Street, near Jackie Robinson Park. It was, at age 29, my first time living alone. I characterize that period of my life—2014 and 2015—with a profound newness. I was making adult friends, learning how to order a drink at a bar, and re-assessing my role in the world as a person who is alive. Things that felt out of reach or off limits to me suddenly felt like they had been waiting for me all along, if only I could find the resolve to meet them head on.
I have always romanticized the sensation of breathing. I remember my late night drives that I took in my hometown (to self-medicate my depression with a 3am coffee from the 24-hour Dunkin Donuts two towns over) by the smell of the air through my rolled-down windows. The official start of spring for me has always been whenever I open my apartment windows and breathe in fresh air. Stuffiness is one of the most uncomfortable feelings I can imagine. The sensation of opening the windows in spring became my metaphor for the sense of tranquility the days and weeks after a good psychedelic drug trip, and it was also the analogy I gave to my director of engineering at work when he asked me, after I told him I was trans, what it felt like to share my real self with my friends and coworkers. He shared back an album that he felt captured the same feeling for him: His Name Is Alive - Mouth By Mouth (thanks Robb).
That first summer after I moved to the LES, I established my favorite ritual: an after-midnight walk through East River Park. Just like my younger self's late night drives to caffeinate away their depression, I remember these walks by the sensation of breathing. There's a lot to remember: NYC in the summer canonically smells like garbage, there's no getting around that, but there's also the scent of water and brine, from the East River nearby and the ocean a couple miles South. Night time somehow heightens the smell of foliage along the sidewalks and in the parks.
Then there was of course all the angst that I was carrying with me from my youth, anxiety about the prospect of growing into fuller person, and most importantly hope that all the aspects of life that I thought weren't meant for me were actually possible to pursue and achieve. And underneath all that, a strange wistfulness, as if I were nostalgic for a past I never actually got to have.
This playlist is not just an attempt to recapture that moment in time in the format of a Late Night Tales album, it's also music to keep taking late night walks to. Because the act growing into a fuller person never ends.
As always, I include the categorization that I use to inform the playlist's ordering. This time, the categories relate to the music's spatial positioning: whether it's teasing me at a distance, or hanging in the air around my head; whether it has a strong beat to walk by, or if it'll trip me up if I'm not careful, or if it will lead me astray.
The full name of the playlist is: A deep breath of wet, floral air, a summer's day remembered by its fading warmth, a familiar heady sensation beckoning you forward, and a night smelling of leaves and unfurling possibilities.