Music can spark ideas for visual artists, providing a mood for editing and sequencing, or even as inspiration for bodies of work. Each month, Lindsey Eckenroth curates a playlist of music to make art to. 

Home. Sometimes I am perturbed by the multiplicities this word conjures in my mind, but other times I am comforted knowing that home is neither a singular nor stable entity. As we continue slouching through the pandemic holiday season, I imagine many of us may be longing for some homes we won’t be visiting, considering how we might find ourselves feeling home anew, differently, safely… and perhaps through art. It is in this spirit that I have curated the current playlist, a lyrical and sonic meditation on ways to get home.

Led Zeppelin’s “Bring it on Home” is likely news to no one, but it provides a suitably bluesy intro that quicky turns hard and riff-tastic. (Plus I simply had to include it here because it’s forever reminiscent of my childhood home; I can still hear it blasting away, as it so often did, on my dad’s stereo.) Staying bluesy but admitting some gospel, we move next to Pops Staples’s “Better Home,” a posthumous duet with his daughter Mavis—even in death, home together in song. Sometimes home is a bar, as Cat Power soulfully illustrates with the help of the Memphis Rhythm Band on “Lived in Bars.” 

The expansively orchestral “Adagio Ma Non Troppo” from Charles Mingus’s 1972 album Let My Children Hear Music follows. Somehow, when the piano enters at 8:05, after we’ve been through so many soaring horn lines and crunchy suspensions and grooves taken up only to be left behind, with that one resigned chord—we’re home. Next up is Kishi Bashi’s sparsely perfect string arrangement of Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place,” followed by the dance break: bluegrass ramblers The Dillards give us an unexpectedly swashbuckling musical setting for a tragic tale of lost love and regret with “Old Home Place,” James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem insists that sometimes home is about stumbling into the night (also “this is the trick / forget a terrible year:” easily interpretable as a 2020 lyric par excellence), and electronic dance-punk rockers Le Tigre invite us to a solo bedroom dance party—“no one to criticize me then.” 

The next two tracks—Mitski’s ethereal, swelling, positively devastating “Two Slow Dancers” and Sam Cooke’s unparalleled plea to “Bring It On Home to Me”—remind us that home can be a person. Then we enter the indie zone: Dean Wareham’s whiny crooning is answered with a reluctantly showy guitar solo on Galaxie 500’s “When Will You Come Home,” and Guided By Voices keep it oddly lo-fi with “Esther’s Day,” a kind of cut-up half song that always spoke to me because “a sparkled shiny diner / is the home for wayward minor.” Continuing with the vagabond theme, Big Thief’s leap-filled “Vegas” seems to be about trying to find home in a person, but then “home becomes a highway.” Yo La Tengo’s “I Feel Like Going Home” is up next, its meandering violin offering a plaintive countermelody to Georgia Hubley’s melancholic vocals. Bright Eyes’ epic “I Must Belong Somewhere” closes out the set. Perhaps a saccharine finale, but one that imparts a needed tinge of hope.

Lindsey Eckenroth is a Brooklyn-based musicologist, flutist, and lover of sounds. When she's not teaching at Brooklyn College and working at RILM, she likes thinking and writing about popular music, documentary films, music and/as affective labor, rock stardom and celebrity, and psychogeography.