Well, I have a running playlist of 300-odd songs - as many as will fit on an ipod shuffle - and it evolves over time but there a few mainstays: Spoon, always welcome as they are in most contexts; Slow Down Tallahassee, whose music could've been made for this; Bon Jovi, a rather unreconstructed favourite of mine from way back and unusually congruous in this context; Chvrches, whose terrific record keeps on being terrific long after it might've been expected to wear off; Belle and Sebastian, mostly, I think, because their music almost always takes me someplace other than my immediate surrounds; the Pains of Being Pure at Heart (they hit some fairly direct pleasure centres for me); Metric (likewise); and then there's Taylor Swift - when it's one of hers, well, it's like having a friend right there beside me, urging me to keep on going, to keep going for another few minutes again, which is sometimes just long enough.
