I assure you that I’m not selecting “Hey Jude” as a playlist song, but it encapsulates what I’m hoping to look at here. This is the third song in what seems to be a run of bummer music. This is bummer but wanting to feel better. The last one was sad and staying that way, this one is sad but not wanting to mope all day.

No song hits all the criteria for this type of music more than Florence + The Machine’s Shake It Out.

I could pretend I’m selecting something else but honestly no one acknowledges your feels and tells you that you can get through them quite like Florence. I could leave it here, but this kind of a mood is a playlist unto itself so maybe I should round it out with a few honourable mentions.

At Your Funeral certainly doesn’t offer much in the way of optimism and things getting better lyrically, but the pace and rhythm of the song will usually have me scream singing along with it and in the process, I will be back to having fun and in a better mood for dealing with people. Pop Emo works well for that. I could just as easily include Black Parade or Cute Without the E here as well. I could easily include the entire catalogue of Blink 182 songs here as well.

I said there wouldn’t be any Hey Jude on this list, but Here Comes the Sun is another go to in this category. It’s a bit more of a getting back to mellow rather than the previous mentioned songs that seem to want me to run through a wall.

I can see myself coming back to this post with a number of “oh yeah, I should have included that” moments. I don’t know why I’m writing this at eight in the morning before I’ve finished my coffee. My brain isn’t sharp enough yet for this. It’s likely that I noticed the gap in blog entries that pressured me to write something. I haven’t even mentioned Left and Leaving by The Weakerthans that fits this category and allows my requisite praise for their music in each of these posts.

We’ll see if I can keep going with these posts or include something a bit different on this site as well. I hope to have a second short story popping up. My novel is also dangerously close to being sent to an editor.

Stay tuned.