More this weekend from me, some recent pictures for you below.

I love Ally’s music and also her music taste. We talked about Radiohead, Liz Phair, making pop music as an alt girl, and car references in songs.

Playlist here.

I think about the Lorde newsletter all the time when she said: “I’m living with heartbreak again.” Living with heartbreak, like a companion, a horse on a lead, threatening to break free and reduce you both to animals at any moment. Living with, as opposed to within.

Thank god grief makes me prolific. I’ve been writing emails, journaling, and making memes like you wouldn’t believe for someone going through a time when the logistics of my life could eat up entire days. Where will I go next? How will I make it work? What will I do with all the time once filled by a person with whom I shared my whole life?

And yet, I find the answer. I’m in Los Angeles for the month, staying with friends and working, so much working. The work feels like a machine, something that takes and gives in equal measure, providing me with purpose as well as propulsion. Everyone I’ve ever dated has told me I work too much; it’s true. I wonder if that’s because I draw the line of work around so many aspects of my life—this newsletter, Bike Lane, turntable, the creative outlets that go unseen by the internet, not to mention my actual job.

I have been thinking about my life through the lens of a bowling alley—graduating college really felt like the bumpers on the lane came down for the first time and I had to start thinking about the gutters. Realizing I wasn’t meant to pursue a traditional career trajectory was the removal of lanes entirely, and in this new life stage suddenly we’re not in a bowling alley at all anymore, we’re “hurling the bowling ball around in the parking lot” (thank you Henrietta).

The silver lining of a big life transition is always that music sounds amazing. I told Henrietta recently that I keep a running breakup playlist, even when I’m in a happy relationship, because I just hear good heartbreak songs all around me and know they’ll come in handy someday. Manifestation? Maybe. But I think it’s a form of preparedness.

But no breakup playlist in this issue—today I’m sharing with you instead my favorite tracks of 2026 so far. I have felt incredibly grateful since starting work on turntable that my life is aligned so centrally around music, that I hear and feel it all so deeply. It’s my particular burden, my particular gift.

turntable is chugging along; I’ll give a short update here: the platform has 100+ beta testers, the email list is up to 1000+, and we’re adding new features all the time. My new friends Nick and Zoe are doing amazing work on the site, and I’m eternally grateful to them and grateful to be working on a team. turntable now has some cool discovery features: a new explore mode that allows you to see related playlists in orbit or list view, listening queues that let you listen to new music recommendations from friends like a playlist, and a new and improved YouTube player for easy non-DSP access (thank you Nick).

Some people have been asking me how I stay motivated towards something with so little real world presence. I think it comes down largely to the idea that I want this place to exist, and I get direct and indirect feedback that other people also want it to exist. I wake up excited to make it a reality. I have a big imagination.

Please comment your favorite tracks of the year so far. Thank you for being here.

The Geese one could be a delayed reverberation of indie culture going mainstream, some distinct disinterest of a certain type of clean cut man in the greasy, grimy noise that makes Geese so lovable to the rest of us. But Clairo—she’s everywhere and she appeals to everyone, with her cute face, dry internet humor, and cool girl sensibilities. She’s Sabrina Carpenter levels of ubiquitous in the Spotify algorithm, at least to me and my circles. It’s really made me realize that we’re all on our own internets, and as much as I think the recommendations in this week’s Currently are mainstream, maybe you’re on the same internet as this guy, and you’ve never heard of Clairo. Enjoy.

I got the pleasure of remembering every fact I know about this song to rattle off to this poor guy—the track is produced by Rostam, a longtime Clairo collaborator, but the drums are actually Danielle Haim, it’s been covered by Arlo Parks and Dominic Fike and just about everyone else, and they all know it’s one of the greatest indie songs of all time.

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Longtime readers of Record Store will know that I became friends with my hero Madeline Kenney by approaching her after a set she played at Outside Lands (punisher behavior) and asking her to listen to my demos (extreme punisher behavior). Somehow it all worked out: we’re bffs and the songs we worked on are actually coming out soon on BL3—a real full circle moment, even as we navigate long distance friendship as she pursues her next dream in Portland, Oregon.

She inspires me endlessly. I tell her in this interview that I love her mind, and truer words have never been spoken. I can’t think of a better first guest to have on this new interview format, where we make ten song playlists and use turntable to annotate them. Madeline’s playlist is here, and you can sign up for the turntable email list on the site as well. It’s been so fun introducing people to the platform through this interview and getting to find out what’s working (and what’s not). I can’t wait to share it with you.

Thanks for being here.

I love seeing someone wearing tangled headphones. It speaks to the desperation of the listener to hear what they want to hear, right now. I used to keep my headphones in the bottom of my purse where they would magically, inevitably turn themselves into a coil of knots. I started tying them up when not in use in a move that felt adult and efficient, but I sort of miss the ritual disentanglement, or choosing to forgo it for one more moment of that song.

I go through seasons when music sounds especially good, and it feels like a miracle every time. It’s been hard to trust that this feeling is cyclical, and when it leaves me it’s not for good. At this point in my life, I’ve made music into something of a job, but there have been times when I loved it for nothing, made hundreds of playlists for myself and no one else. I needed to collect and order and name something to unravel how I felt, to communicate with no one about a particular situation or emotion. I can’t remember if I was angsty and my angst made the playlists coalesce around pining and disillusionment or if it was the other way around. I have always loved a sad song. The work has been a part of me, a pane in my lens of the world, for so long that the cause and effect are indistinguishable from one another.

I was talking to a friend yesterday about why I make things, whether my art can be pure when I feel such a strong motivation to share it. I know there are videos somewhere in some unplayable file format of me prancing around as a child, performing. I wanted to be a Broadway actress. I wanted to be a rockstar. I wanted to be a politician. It feels base to admit that this desire is so core to my orientation towards my work, and myself; it’s true that I create work as an essential expression, an exorcism of something too big to hold, but I also maintain a predisposition to commercialization—that’s why you’re here, reading this newsletter, which is more like a diary entry.

Some days I want to separate my ego from my work and some days I think my perspective is the essence of what I create, and to remove it would be sucking the air out of the balloon. Since I read this Are.na Editorial interview with Emily Segal about the personal nature of work I have thought about it everyday; the belief that good things come from the heart has fundamentally altered my navigation of my business and my life. I am no longer afraid to be cringe on the internet, no longer afraid to be seen trying, because I know what I’m doing is worthwhile to me if to no one else. The commercial success of the next Bike Lane album, which we’ve just finished the demos for and will record this summer, is ancillary to me because I know I am proud of the songs and that my collaborators and I will work to make them good. turntable is still uncapitalized; I know that everything I’m doing is moving me towards success, even if it looks different than I thought it might when I decided to build the thing.

I’ve determined that my foremost goal is to create a body of work that I’m proud of (this strategy maps well onto just about everything in my life—make a mistake in my relationships? handle it in a way I’m proud of. fail to meet a deadline? communicate in a way I’m proud of). Last week, Blake and I were discussing whether he should repost his music as Von Thrasher on streaming, which he took down in a moment of self doubt. I told him if he’s proud of the growth, or the story it tells, or the collaboration it speaks to, put it back. I do not feel that every Bike Lane song is perfect—I don’t even like the way I sound on most of Wake Up in the Weeds (2021)—but ultimately it is good work and I love the thing we made.

So who is it all for? Can I make the world a better place if I’m working towards the categorically selfish goal of making myself proud? I hope that it’s the best use of my energy, that if I focus on fulfilling my purpose the universe will take care of me. I went on a rant on a podcast the other day about why a lot of music is so self-similar now: it’s so expensive and stressful to be alive that people who could get by with one job and make art on the side now have to have two jobs and come home with no time or energy for making anything at all. No one can be blamed for taking a safe bet, making something tried and true. I say all this from the perspective of a person making Phoebe Bridgers rip off music with a benefits-providing day job, but I wish more of my friends were less exhausted. I wish we all had more room to consider what we really should be doing. We’d be in a better place.

All this is to say: are you making yourself proud? Keep going. turntable soon. Bike Lane 3 soon. talk soon.

Just showing you some cool new turntable features on one of the tracks :)

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I’m trying something new this week. I just added a new feature to turntable that allows you to annotate playlists the way you might make notes on a mixtape for a friend.

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I’m beginning this issue of Record Store with some self-plagiarism; I wrote this paragraph to friends in an email recently:

I was thinking about intimacy as I was watching You’ve Got Mail (1998), which I’ve somehow never seen before, on the plane to New York. It was a perfect movie (immediately after watching I considered shifting around my Letterboxd top four, which hasn’t changed in five years), and especially perfect for romanticizing the city. for those of you unacquainted, it follows the story of two New Yorkers: an independent children’s bookstore owner (Meg Ryan) and a thinly veiled Barnes & Noble heir (Tom Hanks) as they develop an early internet correspondence and do light infidelity on their respective partners (Greg Kinnear and Parker Posey), all the while not knowing that the person on the other end of the dial up connection is their business rival and sworn mortal enemy. they chat online, sharing no personal details about their lives, and are very obviously falling in love as the audience watches their missed connections in the real world unfold. they have perfect intimacy; it requires no context, logic, or physical reality to transform them both.

Spoiler alert: Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks discover that they’re basically neighbors and the movie ends with them embracing in Riverside Park. Despite meeting in an online chatroom, their love is legitimized by revealing their corporeal, locational connection. While the transformation begins in the ether of the signal, it is formalized by physical chemistry and practical feasibility; the movie implies that for something to be real, it must exist in the real world.

In the age of globalism, it can seem as though physical proximity is no object. Children of the internet are more native to its platforms and fan pages than the suburbs they happen to be logging on from. I can’t personally say that I was especially influenced ephemera from Arizona any more than I really claim it as my spiritual home (that’s California). Without siblings or a big community of peers in my adolescence, I was disproportionately shaped by the culture I identified with online.

But I’ve been thinking a lot about how music (and community; I’ll get to that) is ultimately a physical, embodied practice. A song coalescing as if by psychic connection at band practice, electric crowds singing the words to a hit together at a show, listening to a record cover to cover with someone you love—these are all real-world experiences. We have to go outside, step away from our screens, and engage with each other to have them. The club is a real place, and it’s dying.

I was talking to a friend recently and they reminded me that our work is not our lives; work can fulfill and shape us, but we’re made of more. Community, love, service, craft, interest all contribute to our meaning even if they don’t directly contribute to our Work. By work I mean the capital-W, reason-you’re-put-on-the-earth Work.

So if work is part of meaning, and meaning is part of life, where does grounding in the real world sit? Especially for me, making an essentially online community space whose IRL home is my laptop and some server god knows where, it can feel like the world I really exist in doesn’t map perfectly onto the one where my body is. I’m reminded of the way I felt as a teenager in Arizona, waiting for my real life to begin, when I would become the person I was online. I want my work to be real, I want to hold it in my hands.

I feel online culture verging back towards the world outside. People are looking for more curated (more human) spaces online, like the kind of space I hope turntable will be. I just got on Rec League, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised how many of the recommendations I’m seeing are for small businesses, physical objects, and systems of being. The curated and the physical converge because when we think about what we love, it’s often grounded in our lives outside the screen, what we get to experience when we step into the spaces we share with each other.

I have a laundry list of features I want to develop for turntable, but I decided to work on searching by scene in this development sprint because so much interesting work is coming out of local confluences of talent. The scene that got the most attention last year was that of the Copenhagen girls: think Astrid Sonne, ML Buch, Molina, Erika de Casier, Smerz, Ydegirl, and Fine. These artists didn’t develop in a vacuum; they exist in a community (in this case largely facilitated by the formal setting of the Rytmisk Musikkonservatorium) that allows them to easily collaborate. As a member of a previously Postal Service-style band, I am astounded at how many good ideas you can have just hanging out together, in the same room.

I want turntable to, in the absence of actually being real, reflect something real, like a local scene. I want it to surface spheres of influence, to show us the hidden connections we have to each other in a way that feels exciting and legible, not spooky and violating. One day, I also want to bring it into the real world with record swaps, shows, and mixtape mixers, but for now, I hope that this method of exploration reveals a new way to discover and appreciate music.

My work continues to be mostly behind a screen, but I’m increasingly meeting people IRL that are excited about turntable, about digital spaces facilitating real connections, and about music listening as a practice in joyful work. I’m also meeting a lot of people through my self-described “extremely aggressive social media campaign” that are encouraging me to keep going and saying that turntable seems cool, which is really all I can hope for when blowing up a hype bubble. I am excited about making something useful, informed by the many conversations I’m having with artists, music business professionals, curators, community builders, and other people in the taste space. Thanks for all the kind words so far. turntable will be yours soon.

I am completely obsessed with the debut waterbaby album. “If you need someone to remember you / Just know I remember it all.” I’m also obsessed with the Harvest Moon (1992) callback in the album art, which I can’t find any writing about anywhere. Am I insane? This is 100% Harvest Moon.

I’m also curious if the Harvest Moon reference isn’t translating because Black women fight such an uphill battle against being automatically categorized as R&B, neo-soul, etc. (see this very important Rachel Chinouriri PSA). Are people potentially not even considering Neil Young as an inspiration for this record, even though it so clearly sounds like him too? This playlist kind of runs with that theme—see the Neil Young track below.

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The winter was brief. The storms themselves were huge, the kind of feathery snow that piles up past the windows, blocking out the sun when it finally reemerges. Each time it felt like the real season had finally begun and now you would see your breath for months on end, would plod around in fur-lined boots and scrape your windshield every morning in the muffled, glowing dawn.

But the cold fronts were each followed by bluebird days too bright, the sun lighting up the snow-laden trees so brilliantly they dwindled in its warm grasp. Do the bears still make dens if the season isn’t long enough for a real slumber? How do they know it’s time to wake up? If they sleep too long, do they miss the ripening of berries, trundling out of their caves to find the fruit rotten, wasted on the forest floor?

I grew up in a place without seasons. Some might say I live in a place without seasons still, but I’d argue that they’re just more subtle, shifts in the quality of the light or the speed of the wind that signal change. I feel this change deeply, and let myself be carried by it like a leaf in the current of a river.

I used to deny my cycles. I ran until I stopped menstruating and bought apples under the fluorescent lights of the grocery store in February. I conceived of myself as strong, unyielding to weariness, the master of my earthly vessel. I liked the idea that I existed outside of the constraints that seemed to bind everyone else; I was better because I was harder, evolved past the need to be in tune with the rhythms of the world.

I started working at a farmers market during the pandemic. I loved handling the wet vegetables in the summer heat, loved smiling at my regulars through my mask. At that time, people were flocking to the markets because they were afraid to shop at the grocery store. Eventually, the risk abated but the people kept coming to the stand, I think to see each other and us, or just to go to a place you could still go to. I stopped buying the limp, sulking vegetables from Trader Joe’s and just took home some of what we sold every week. In this way, I learned to live with the seasons.

Last weekend I was walking with a friend in North Berkeley and she asked me how I knew all the names of the flowers I called out as we walked by. Wisteria, cornelias, jasmine, magnolias, poppies, hydrangeas, foxglove, hollyhocks, sour grass. Although we lived in Arizona, where the spring was any other place’s summer, my mom valiantly bought and rebought flowers for her garden every year. I remember the first time we had poppies in the planter boxes, the papery kind whose heads drooped over just a few days after springing up. When I moved to California, I used to walk with my housemates through the campus botanical garden, reading the names on the plaques. I suppose these kinds of things just stuck, where linear algebra and data types did not.

I measure the spring in the progression of flowers. First the magnolias peek out from under their fuzzy felted hats, covering the barren winter trees with an unimaginable density of rich blooms. Then the jasmine and California poppies emerge, like weeds; I invariably see my first poppy of the season in a road median, sweetly gracing the unattended landscaping. Next comes the wisteria, raining down on the neighborhood fragrant confetti of a delicate purple color. Every year I worry that the phases of the season are coming too soon, that it’s too early for the rain to dry up and the sun to beat down.

If I ever left this place, would I know another like this again? I’m in Los Angeles as I write this, and I’m in awe of the Hong Kong orchid trees that line the streets. I knew them because my mother tried to grow one in our yard my entire life and it never flourished in the heat. It was a shock to see them so thick with flowers but recognize them as the same tree from my childhood. I haven’t seen any magnolia trees around, nor wisteria.

My habits have become seasonal as well—I knit in the fall, collage in the winter, write music in the spring. In summer I read as much as I can, soaking up all the world around me and staying quiet in the hope that some bright bird will alight on my still, outstretched hand. I listen to a lot of pop music in the winter months, and usually take a full week for Emotion (2015) in March. I don’t necessarily do so intentionally, but the same thoughts occur to me, as if novel, every year at the same time. I feel the gravity of the seasons and I abide by them.

I often joke that I wish God himself would come down out of the sky and give me a thumbs up, affirm that I’m on the right path and working towards the right things. I envy people I’ve known who are so talented that their future was as obvious as written proclamation, even if the road was a hard one. How are we to know if we’re wasting our precious lives dithering towards an inappropriate, imperfect goal? How are we to know a phase from a seismic and permanent change, a season’s spiral from time’s straight line?

And yet, without such definitive proof, we must keep living. I used to comfort myself as an anxiety-laden teenager that time would continue to pass whether or not I felt prepared for it to do so. I move forward to the best of my ability, toward what feels good and away from what does not, reduced to my animal sense of morality. I like that Los Angeles is so warm, I dislike that the sky is a peaked shade of blue. I might like to pass a season here.

This week, I started posting Instagram reels. If you asked me last year if I would ever own an influencer fuzzy mic and a tripod, I would have laughed at you. Actually, I would have gotten offended, felt like your question was a judgement of my character, and thought about which aspect of my personality was giving off “influencer” for multiple days afterwards.

But it turns out that becoming a social media star is a great way to share your music community platform, because so many people are using Instagram as a makeshift music community platform. If there was a better place to talk about turntable online, I wouldn’t have had to make turntable. I don’t like being a person who owns a fuzzy mic, but someone’s gotta do it.

Social media is a very interesting beast even for the average user, more interesting still for artists and bands. TikTok’s function as a career launching pad was finally becoming a legible when it was sold to American buyers and became a ghost town of AI slop, the dead internet theory come alive. No one can really agree on how to go viral—post everyday, make trendy videos even if they’re totally irrelevant to your project, be hot—except that you have to be on social media almost constantly, either consuming or producing content.

When Blake and I were rolling out the last Bike Lane EP My Heart Will Be Facing Backwards (2023), I posted lip syncing videos, sped up videos, dancing videos. It was like a humiliation ritual—I prayed no one would see them; I prayed everyone would see them. Scrolling through TikTok for hours a day, calling it research, I saw many people complaining that they were expected to make music and also promote it vigorously online, to be both artists and influencers. Probably because I watched those videos all the way through, I saw quite a few of them.

Being an independent artist has always come with many hats to wear, the idea being that you got to keep the money you would otherwise pay out to people who wore the hats for you: publicists, label managers, actual managers, tour bookers. I think the where the new artist paradigm feels cumbersome and exhausting is that even bands signed to labels with teams of people promoting their work have to make the TikToks; the issue is vertically pervasive up to the echelon of actual stardom (does Dua Lipa have a TikTok? If she does, it’s just videos of her and her friends on beaches, and that still helps her streaming numbers more than the hundreds of lip sync videos made by smaller artists).

Artists feel like they have to make demeaning but potentially viral short form content because music discovery is broken. Teens are listening to snippets and then never bothering to find the full song; Apple Music and TikTok recently signed a deal for the streaming service to offer full-length plays in-app on TikTok to mitigate this issue. In my opinion, this solution addresses the problem too far downstream, capitulating to short form as the dominant music discovery mechanism and attempting to capture revenue from a new, separate format and call it a success for musicians. What about getting paid for making music aside from how viral you are on TikTok?

I’ve highlighted a lot of turntable’s features that are designed for curators and enthusiasts, but since I’m back in the shark-infested waters of social media, I’ve been thinking about how it can be a tool for artists, how an online space just for music might release us from lip sync purgatory. What if new music didn’t have to compete with videos of puppies or absurdist skits or AI slop? I certainly can’t compete with any of that, even though I know Bike Lane’s music is good and worth listening to.

Artists should be free to experiment with different mediums if they want to, but forcing them to post videos when they actually just want to write music is counterproductive for the health of their art. Not only does social media take significant time to do well (and artists notoriously have so much free time and definitely don’t have multiple jobs), it also feels, from experience, like a spiritual drain, a bottomless pit of self-doubt. Pitching your music to radio stations and publications felt similarly effortful, but didn’t require you to perform like a circus animal to be heard by your target audience.

I’m developing turntable not because I desperately want to found a startup, nor because I want to become an influencer, although it seems I’m on my way to both those things. I love music so much that my many pursuits converged on it from multiple angles: my job at the Greek, my writing, Bike Lane, my data science degree. I want to see the music industry change to support artists and critics and fans, instead of yielding to tech. I feel that as a music person, I’m uniquely positioned to make a positive impact in this space through a product that helps artists and fans connect to one another outside the arena of short form content. Most of all, I just want to keep making and thinking about music forever.

If you’re interested in turntable as an investor, engineer, or good-ideas-haver, you can email me at amaya@amayalim.com

I fell behind on new music during my iPod week. I think if I were to switch entirely over to the iPod, I’d have to come up with an intentional strategy regarding hearing new releases, but for now I’m on the combination plan: streaming for discovery/survey + Bandcamp/Nina for supporting artists whose records I really love. I had this new Ratboys on my list to check out and I listened to it on a long drive across California. This record is certainly their best so far, a huge leap from their last record, which I also loved. I am usually predisposed to an artist’s early work, so I’m pleased how much I liked this one. Other standout tracks include: “Penny in the Lake” and “What’s Right?”

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Four days into my blissful iPod week of intentional listening and ethical art appreciation, I cheated. Okay, really I made some new rules for myself:

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The iPod is an iconic device. It momentarily dominated the music scene with its sleek design and intuitive UI, built on the nuance of a court case that ruled mp3 players to be legal while the format itself existed in a gray area, the RIAA looking for a scapegoat for the piracy crisis and failing to find one in tech. The first iPod could hold 1000 songs; I checked my streaming stats before I started this project and I listened to nearly this many songs last month.

The iPod Classic 5.5 I bought had a 10 gigabyte hard drive and worked fine when I received it, but I was interested in modding. I’d learned this term on TikTok, where people were showing off their bright pink terabyte iPods with modern charging and Bluetooth. iPods are made of simple, modular technology that can be taken apart and replaced with modern components with a magnifying lens and a pair of tweezers.

For me, and for many young people who grew up with streaming and iPhones, the barrier to moving away from Spotify is that there is no viable 1:1 alternative. I could switch to Apple Music, but I’d still be participating in a system that ultimately devalues the labor of artists. I could start buying all the music I’ve ever heard and liked, but I’d have to move out of my apartment. These ethical issues feel so large and unsolvable that I often started thinking about switching, got overwhelmed, and decided to pay for another month of my subscription.

There are also limitations to the iPod itself. I like to listen to music while I work out, and have become very reliant on my AirPods. In a perfect world, I’d like a huge amount of storage to best approximate the vastness of the streaming catalog I interact with. The old 30 pin connectors are hard to find and feel inconvenient in an age when audio, data, and power all flow through one port.

I am crafty (I knit, collage, etc) but I’ve never ventured from software to hardware. The stakes feel higher, harder to undo a misstep once made. In some of the videos I watched, people were holding soldering irons and I immediately clicked away, sweating. I was afraid of damaging a piece irreparably, having to start over with another iPod, or ordering all the wrong parts off Elite Obsolete, a website whose 2008 UI makes it feel very trustworthy but very intimidating.

I decided to work with moonlit.market, a British company that sells iPod modding kits. I wanted to minimize the points at which I could mess up, but I also felt like the kit had the modern options I would have chosen anyway. The kits are a good option for those looking for an accessible entry point to modding, a camp I figured many Record Store users would fall into. They upgrade the device with USB-C charging, hugely increased storage capacity, and Bluetooth compatibility, my three main modification interests.

Spotify removed consequences for expansive listening, and I believe I benefitted from the nonexistent barriers to exploration. But the work I do through streaming is to build ever wider, not deeper, and I see ways in which my taste could benefit from a more serious and intentional period of listening. I chose the following albums to download on my iPod this week, and deleted Spotify.

1. Middle Cyclone - Neko Case

2. Raspberry Moon - Hotline TNT

3. The Bends - Radiohead

4. choke enough - Oklou

5. For Emma, Forever Ago - Bon Iver

6. Foxes in the Snow - Jason Isbell

7. Heaven or Las Vegas - Cocteau Twins

8. Cardinal - Pinegrove

9. Electric Hour - Sword ii

10. Fantastic, Vol. 2 - Slum Village

I made my record choices quickly, downloading whatever came to mind that I 1) already owned physically or digitally and 2) knew I’d want to hear at any given time. It’s a mix of old, reliable favorites and albums I’ve been meaning to give a proper listen.

I’ll still listen to the radio on the way to work, NTS sets throughout the day, or music in other people’s cars, but my personal listening will be limited to the iPod for a week. I want to see how many lyrics from these records I can memorize, what new feelings I can wring out of the songs I’ve known forever. I’m excited to note where there’s joy and frustration in the process as I adjust to imperfect, incomplete on-demand access. I’ll update you on my experience in a week.

I have been writing some interludes for the Bike Lane record that are largely inspired by short songs like this one.

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Today I’m writing about some new turntable features and sharing a special reference playlist for the nascent Bike Lane record, Can I Call You Tomorrow? I wrote over the weekend about how this year really legitimized my artistic practice, as I saw for the first time how Record Store, Bike Lane, and turntable were all three arms of the same tree, aligning around a central ethos of music curation and creation.

To this end, I’m opening the turntable beta test group to my paid subscribers. While these projects began as distinct from one another, they obviously share a lot of influence and use—both, I hope, are tools for intentional listening and discovery. Heck, they share a logo. Record Store will hopefully one day be integrated into the turntable interface, along with other editorial features that contextualize music for engaged music creators and appreciators.

Blake and I are starting to get serious about finishing our record this year and playing some shows (touring, perhaps?) around it. We’re lucky enough to now live in the same city and practice every week. I feel the new songs are some of the best I’ve ever written. There are some really funny ones too.

New things on turntable since I last wrote you about it:

• explore by tag: I currently use ~15 tags to organize my own 950+ playlists. They’re non-exclusive, so some playlists have many tags and some have none. My tags include glass, sky, shadow, and water

• folders: I have my playlists in folders for each 100, plus my 00s for easy access. You can order them any which way you want

• top five: you can save your top five playlists on your profile, a la Letterboxd.

• tunable analytics: filter by tag, year, or folders

• new map interface: view most similar playlists, filter customization using AND/OR, and a preview panel

Things on turntable that I want to build with your support:

• release pages: if you don’t make playlists, the service is a little hard to use right now. In the future, you’ll be able to save albums and songs to your library

• annotations: something that I loved about the mixtape/CD mix era was the ability to write notes about the choices

• data visualization: you know your taste is cool, but how are you going to tell other people? We need better graphs

• fast(er): the site is slow because I am not really a software engineer (yet). Help me hire someone to make it fast!

Currently will still include the extra playlists, and hopefully with more paid subscribers we can get a bit of a chat/collaborative playlist situation happening. I’d love to connect with more of you over intentional listening.

Currently trending in my brain: double knitting, silver bracelets, doing drills to get stronger, reading as a social activity, magnolias, my new ereader (I’m actually obsessed with this object) that I’m using to read more outside, the beach, making my own Louise Carmen dupes, my new dark blue pen, cheese sticks, direct sunlight in your house, REFY brow sculpt, tracking my spending (I use Origin) to save money.

For the last decade, I’ve spent my New Years Day writing myself a letter to open on the last day of the year. The exercise is part reflection, part diary, part exorcism; the holidays have always depressed me a little and I always feel I have something heavy I need to let out and put down. I blame the lack of structure, the liminal days that bleed into each other both backward and forward, but I think the truth is simpler: there’s just a little too much time for thinking when the nights are long.

In my letter this year, which I’ve tried hard to forget so I will be astonished and sentimental when I open it in twelve months time, I wrote a bit about how I manifested my vision board last year. Its coming to fruition felt like a process that I watched with astonishment from the sidelines of my life, even as other, more functional parts of me worked directly toward that end. The watching parts were afraid to believe, afraid to look and to look away, as I turned myself back towards music as the central pillar of my life.

The guiding phrase of my 2025 was “Better than FREE? SEARCHING,” which I promptly paraphrased to “Better than knowing? Finding out.” My whole life I felt deeply uncomfortable with flux and fallibility. I hated being a kid because I wanted to stop changing and know who I was going to be, for the rest of forever. I was afraid to want anything because I might fail to obtain it—better to wish for nothing and be happy with what you’ve got.

In the fall I went to a talk with a speaker who had started his own company a few years prior. Someone asked him if he regretted anything about his trajectory, and he answered, gravely, “Regret is a backward-facing emotion. I’m forward-facing, so I don’t really experience regret.” I was inspired by this declaration, and told two friends that I agreed with him: no regret.

Since then, I’ve been downright haunted by my regrets, which present themselves intrusively, randomly, for my consideration, a parade of undead memories. Most are related to something stupid I said without thinking, some to things I wish I’d said but didn’t, but a few especially pointed regrets are those of wishing I had wished.

In my music, I’m a yearner. Bike Lane is built on the back of my wanting. But in my everyday life, I eschew emotional risk. Music has always been my Big Love, but I’ve considered it more of a special interest than a career option. I told a friend recently that in adolescence I developed a delineation between my real life and my emotional life, the former in which I was practical and the latter in which I was positively washed away by my feelings. Music became my primary outlet for expression, both writing and curating, because it was a safe way to say what I was thinking, if only to myself.

I’ve done a lot of work in my adulthood to merge these two selves, this newsletter being one big step towards taking my artistic practice seriously. Writing the songs that would become the first Bike Lane album was another big step, largely facilitated by the pandemic and the emotional devastation it afforded me (joking, sort of). In the last year, working on turntable has really brought forth a level of confidence I didn’t realize I was lacking until it appeared, allowing me to publicly grant my life shape and legitimacy that I didn’t before.

My vision board party is next week, and I’ve been finding myself imagining what magical phrase I might find to shape my 2026. I’m certainly not finished learning the lesson that finding out is better than knowing; I’ve heard running a startup is a long journey of many small failures that hopefully lead to one slightly larger success. I’m willing to admit that I actually want this thing to work, to create a community space that’s made for music, that’s not run by evil technology corporations, that’s useful and that yields meaningful connections.

In 2024 I wrote a lot about how I was feeling kind of distant from music, which is another way of saying I was feeling distant from myself. In 2025, I felt closer to myself and to music than ever, and it was a joy—the kind of relief you see in memes and movies about war—to rediscover some of the songs that I loved as a kid and feel them again like I did then. Not to be corny, but I attribute the return of sensation to pursuing my dreams.

I realized as I was tagging and categorizing all my music on turntable that I’ve been making playlists for ten years. Sometime soon, I’ll throw a big party for my 1000th playlist, and I’ll have to decide if I’m going to reset the rules, keep going, or close this chapter completely. Lately I’ve been finding myself gravitating towards listening to full albums or even discographies, with spurts of playlisting in between.

Most likely I’ll keep making playlists exactly as before, because of the expression mechanism I wrote about above. I need the constraints of the format to provide an interesting challenge for my logical brain while I look for myself in the songs. What would I be without this diary?

A few people have advised me to write down my goals with turntable as I begin looking for funding, as I need to be clear about what I can compromise on and what I can’t. I want to create an online space where people can share and connect over music. I want people to feel excited about curation and active discovery. I want to utilize data as a tool for understanding, not an ends to which music is just a means.

If you’re here, all the way at the end of this article especially, you probably feel similarly to me about music and the way that streaming has negatively impacted artists, fan communities, writers and critics, and even casual listeners. After I talked to Liz Pelly in early 2025, I felt like I could see what needed to change but wasn’t sure how to begin. Everyone I talked to said something similar; poor alternatives, not enough incentive, difficult tradeoffs. A year on, I’m excited about the future that we’re creating as a community of people who genuinely just love music and want to see creativity thrive in dark times. How will we ultimately bring this future to the people?

I’m still finding out.