Library
Music
Three playlists, kept on Spotify: one for momentum, one for conscience, one running log of the year.
41 tracks
Forward Motion
Fall seven times, stand up eight.
Forty-one tracks with one job: get the body moving before the mind can file an objection. Missy Elliott and Biggie do the heavy lifting; Survivor and The Greatest Showman handle the parts that are supposed to be embarrassing and aren't. It ends, deliberately, on two songs about leaving home — because forward motion is only ever motion away from something.
10 tracks · 36 min
Higher Ground
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
The shortest list here, and the only one built to be played in order. It moves from a river baptism to Marvin Gaye's question, from Sam Cooke's patience to Amazing Grace, and lands on an Amen. Music for the mornings when conscience reaches the desk before the calendar does.
Aaron Douglas, Aspiration, 1936. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. © Heirs of Aaron Douglas.
22 tracks · 1 hr 23 min
2026 Vibes
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
A year kept as a playlist rather than a journal. Doechii's "Anxiety" sits a few tracks from Nina Simone's "Feeling Good," and that gap is more or less the whole record of the year so far. Still being added to; the tonal whiplash is the point, not a bug.
Edward Hopper, The Long Leg, 1935. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino. © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.