Seeking the perfect tracks for kiddie-pool beer, hippie camping, crashing weddings, fireworks, power tools, age-inappropriate partners and buying rounds? Well, this Local Spins pundit has you covered.
A Song to Make You Wish You Had Better Effects Pedals: Grand Rapids’ Jade TV is part of this Guest Playlist. (Photo/John Hanson)
Troy Reimink (Photo/Anthony Norkus)
EDITOR’S NOTE: As part of the celebration of Local Spins’ fourth anniversary, we’ve asked some of our writers and contributors to create Top 10 playlists of favorite tunes for spring and summer — right before the music festival season really heats up. The only caveat: At least one of the picks must be a local or regional artist.
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For his list, Local Spins’ ever-clever Troy Reimink, who also co-hosts WYCE FM’S “New Standards” show on Sunday nights, assembled an eclectic roster of songs to suit any summer occasion — from slip-n-sliding to getting nostalgic/feeling old to realizing your fly is open. As he puts it: “Summer is here! With months of postcard-perfect weather stretched before us like a buffet of infinite possibility, the tendency is to set lofty, unrealistic goals, then sit on the porch until mid-August, when you realize you’ve done only a fraction of the traveling, camping, barbecuing, biking, water-sporting and cornhole-playing you had envisioned. I can’t help you with time management, but I do have 10 songs to get you through this cruel, cruel season. Whatever your summer goals, and wherever you are in life, there’s something on here for you.”
LOCAL SPINS SPRING/SUMMER PLAYLIST BY TROY REIMINK
1. The Hold Steady, “Constructive Summer” – Ideal for: Retrieving your cutoffs from winter storage; defacing a billboard; doing shirtless pushups; doing shirtless everything; fishing a Bud Light Lime out of the kiddie pool you woke up in; late-night slip-n-sliding; being in the prime of your life and not appreciating it.
2. Japandroids, “Continuous Thunder” – Ideal for: Watching fireworks; driving back from a day at the beach with a group of friends; moving home after graduating with an impractical degree, where your childhood bedroom, and decades of accumulating student loan debt, await; picking up right where you left off with your high school friends.
3. The Range, “Copper Wire” – Ideal for: Ingesting a miscalculated cocktail of chemicals en route to the EDM stage; losing your friends the instant your phone dies; somehow finding the worst bathroom at Bonnaroo; grinding your teeth all night; hoping the spiders are imaginary; going to sleep at 5 a.m. at a random spot in a field because you can’t find your tent; waking up sunburned and robbed of your possessions; doing it all again next summer.
4. Anderson .Paak, “Come Down” – Ideal for: Strutting down the sidewalk in a trendy new outfit; high-fiving strangers; opening a fire hydrant to the delight of the gathering children; picking a fresh flower and handing it to a girl you’ve never met before; buying a round for the entire rooftop bar; giving a toast at a wedding you weren’t invited to; learning that your fly has been down the entire time.
5. The Sundays, “Summertime” – Ideal for: Noticing that the fashions of your formative years are being revived ironically by a younger generation; seeing a pixie-haired girl in Doc Martens and a sundress and flashing back to the summer of 1997, which you spent sneaking out at night with your first girlfriend to smoke stolen cigarettes while driving on endless country backroads; wondering where the years have gone.
6. Jade TV, “Dream” – Ideal for: Wishing you had more and better effects pedals; accepting that the local music scene is now in younger and more capable hands; being 10 years older than everyone at the house show; learning about the cool new venues just in time for them to shut down.
7. Solange, “Losing You” – Ideal for: Catching the eye of a striking, unfamiliar person from across the room at a party; stealing glances for long enough to make the electrifying discovery that she’s also looking at you; working up the courage to approach her; hitting it off; getting her number; learning on the first date that she’s a Trump supporter.
8. Teddybears, “Yours To Keep” – Ideal for: Cruising with an age-inappropriate partner in the convertible you have purchased to mitigate a mid-life crisis; instigating a romantic fling that has no realistic shot of lasting past August; sipping an artisan cocktail and picking at a $14 salad on the patio of a farm-to-table restaurant in a formerly working-class neighborhood and realizing you might be part of the problem.
9. Cheerleader, “Sunshine of Your Youth” – Ideal for: Hosting a backyard barbecue for people you don’t remember becoming friends with; entering a conversation with the other dads about power tools; saving for retirement; thinking about investing in real estate; suddenly enjoying golf.
10. Anohni, “Drone Bomb Me” – Ideal for: Realizing that no matter how much summer fun you pack into the next three or four months, it will not offset the inevitability of climate change, unending war, robots that kill people from the sky, a potentially catastrophic presidential election and a cruel and arbitrary economic system hopelessly rigged to benefit the already wealthy and powerful.
TROY REIMINK: The Local Spins Playlist on Spotify
Copyright 2016, Spins on Music LLC
