Stopgap: Pure Colour

A playlist for a friend

for christy. a playlist inspired by sheila heti’s pure colour. songs that exist between being organic as a tree and artificial as an electric lamp, songs for yearning and missing somebody, songs that evoke the colours and are beautiful.

I don’t have any finished pieces to share this week, so as a stopgap, I’m sharing this playlist and an accompanying letter that explains my song selection. A bonus round, if you will. A playlist and six-page scrappily written letter may not be something everyone is interested in, but I like it. I’m aware my handwriting looks like that of a deranged child.

Christy is a dear friend of mine. I met her about six months ago at a Static Vision screening I was at with Ryan, and we’ve been close since then. She is very kind to me, and a formidable intellect. The books she lends me to read are the primary reason I’ve been reading so much recently. Her selections are carefully considered - she’s an expert literary nutritionist who provides books which nourish me based on my current lifestyle factors.

One of these books was Pure Colour by Sheila Heti. I’ve previously talked about this book on the Substack - I discussed it and an excerpt was included in the Café del Mar post a few weeks ago.

I think we decided that I would make her a playlist to pay her back for her thoughtful recommendations. We had been discussing Pure Colour at length, and we decided this novel would make a good concept for a playlist for her. We often joke that she is the teacher and I am the student. This was a very engaging and fun assignment.

The playlist is broad in style and genre, stupidly so in fact. It’s got an autumnal feel about it, and thematically the songs are about beauty, coming to terms with things, nature and artifice, being wrought and being overwrought… Like the book, it’s quite silly.

I kept telling her I should write down my motivations for the song selections, but it occurred to me it would be difficult to find the time. Perhaps the only free time I could do this in was my lunch break at work. There’s not much around my office in Braybrook, so over three lunch breaks, I managed to get on my bike and sneak away to a cafe or a park to write this annotated tracklist, before scanning it on the office printer. Yes, I feel like Frank O’Hara.

There were four colours of highlighter in the stationary cupboard.

Making this playlist and writing the letter below was great fun. Christy and I had been discussing the days when I more commonly made mixtapes or wrote people hand-written letters (I recently showed her a love letter I found at my parents house from when I was 15), and how I miss this. It also exemplifies how we can use music or art or media to create meaning in our lives.

Christy was happy for me to share the letter. Upon reading it, she said “I’m going to refrain from saying anything that makes me sound like a teacher marking your ‘assignment’, and instead just say, reading it made me very happy :)))”