Category Archives: Music

Our second playlist for this coquette summer is at hand for the moments before we turn the page to July. When summer turns to high, all feels endlessly glorious with the world, like summer could last forever. Every year it feels like that, every year it feels endless – or maybe that’s just hope. No matter how much we know it will end, we hope. 

This is the second Coquette Summer playlist – entitled simply ‘coquettish’. Beneath the spell of summer, this music percolates like an old-school coffee-maker, sputtering auditory stimulation and sweetness to mask the murder of democracy for which this country seems headed. Enjoy what is possibly our last summer of freedom, bury your head in the sand and songs, and coquette away your trifling worries. 

This is the soundtrack to the world getting fucked, and no one paying any attention to it. 

Opus 17 – Dustin O’Halloran

The Forbidden Fruits of Eden – AURORA

Petite Fleur – The Hot Sardines

From the Start – Laufey

Love Is – Ingrid Michaelson and Jason Mraz

I Guess I Was Daydreaming – Cake on Cake

Heavenly – Cigarettes After Sex

Opus 23- Dustin O’Halloran

Material Girl – Kris Bowers

What Love Will Do To You – Laufey

Zou Bisou Bisou – Gillian Hills

Kinda Hate U, Kinda Love U – Alex Sloane 

Smaller Than This – Sarah Kays

The Conflict of the Mind – AURORA

Opus 36- Dustin O’Halloran

Diamond – Hanna V and Joe Rodwell

Blank Space – Vitamin String Quartet 

Home for the Summer – Sarah Kays

Come on Rainbow – Cake on Cake

Dear Diary – Alex Sloane

Petite Fleur – Chris Barber’s Jaxx Band

La Madrague – Brigitte Bardot 

Beautiful Stranger – Laufey

Sunsetz – Cigarettes After Sex

Pink In the Night – Mitski

A Night to Remember – Laufey and beabadoobee

Rises the Moon – Liana Flores

Lately, I’ve found myself overthinking a lot of things – almost everything. Maybe it was the middle-aged rite of passage that is the colonoscopy that set the mind into extra motion. Maybe it’s the anniversary of last summer quickly approaching and reminding me of heavier days. Maybe it’s the quieter start of the season, and its tumultuous roller-coaster of weather that has the mind spinning. All of it has pushed me back into the overly-analytical and obsessively introspective mode that once formed the baseline of daily life. I thought I had moved beyond that, but maybe I haven’t quite yet. And so the coquette summer, only so recently begun, lowers its veil of lace – to obscure my excessive analysis, to quell my insufferable introspection.

Beautiful stranger sitting right there Looked up at me and my dark curly hair Looked up for a second, didn’t want to be rude I tend to fall in love on the tube Beautiful stranger sitting right there Reading the newspaper, stuck to his chair I swore that he smiled and I felt my heart drop Heard the doors open, came to my stop

Beautiful stranger sitting right there It’s fate we collided right then back there I wonder if he felt the same thing too Innocent crush on the morning commute

Bedtime used to be around 10 PM on the good night, when I could quiet my brain and calm that pesky train of thoughts. The past few months have found it moving after midnight, and when I finally do put myself down, sleep doesn’t always come immediately. I find myself regressing to the nights when insomnia ravaged and ruined the next day. That’s when things start spiraling, and shadows lend shadows to shadows. My youth was spent mostly living in my mind, conjuring stories and adventures from my imagination, too scared to set anything real in motion outside of the safety of my head. As if that was any sort of safe space…

What if I would’ve stayed on the train Dared to stand up and ask for his name Maybe we would have exchanged a few words A fairytale moment could have occurred But my beautiful stranger will have to remain A stranger until I see him again Unless I never will

Beautiful strangers passed around me in those innocent days, on trains or subway cars or airplane cabins. Glimpses of handsomeness, coupled with the occasional spark of a wink, induced a queasy promise that I might one day thrill someone without worry or discomfort or hesitation. My mass of neuroses, which would likely save my life for all the precautions and care it caused me to worriedly exercise in the years that followed, mangled and tortured the way I moved through my early twenties. Those were the years of the beautiful strangers, and all their beautiful fantasies – unfurling so perfectly because they never quite unfurled at all. Nothing real ever happened because I was too frightened to let it, and so everything took place in the mind. My overwrought, over-wrung, overly-taxed mind. I made it all so much harder than it had to be. 

A coquette summer, with all its frilly silliness, might go some way toward providing enough distraction to gently shake one out of too much thinking… rounding our little lives with that beautiful, elusive sleep… 

My beautiful stranger will have to remain A love that came and left with the train My beautiful stranger

Queasy summer shower, steam off the pavement, evening coming on too quickly no matter how late the light lasts. A preponderance of pink in the night, a song by Mitski to accompany the mood, a fan of pink feathers to wave away the heat. Coquette summers are all about the exquisite ache, the untethered longing, the there-but-not-there emptiness of loss. Summer gains darkness as the years go by, so we need a little pink glow to get us through the night.

I glow pink in the night in my room
I’ve been blossoming alone over you
And I hear my heart breaking tonight
I hear my heart breaking tonight
Do you hear it too?
It’s like a summer shower
With every drop of rain singing
“I love you, I love you, I love you
I love you, I love you, I love you
I love you, I love you, I love you”

Sigh of decadent dismissal, smile of weak and shaky form, movements of languid timidity. Sentences broken into pieces of phrase, words cut and shattered, grammar torn. Cruel, abrupt, clipped summer. Evocation and adoration too. Summer carves out its space, removing its heart.

I could stare at your back all day
I could stare at your back all day
And I know I’ve kissed you before, but
I didn’t do it right
Can I try again, try again, try again
Try again, and again, and again
And again, and again, and again

The forecast calls for a mixed-bag of weekend weather – rain has a decent chance of falling – and a summer weekend of rain makes for a very sad weekend indeed. Another coquette summer song then – ‘The Conflict of the Mind’ – to give atmosphere to this conflicted moment. It’s part of an upcoming Coquette Summer Playlist – the second installment, on the way in a little over a week. 

It’s a complicated story
That we never talk about
But I see it in the mirrors
In the curtains of our house
I don’t want you to be worried
That we’re running out of time
It doesn’t matter where we’re going
We can leave it all behind

Only when I see you cry
I feel conflicted in my mind
It fills my heart up and it breaks me at the very same time
When you open up the gates for me
And leave the world behind
We find proof of love is hidden
In the conflict of the mind

I remember how I’d find you
Fingers tearing through the ground
Were you digging something up
Or did you bury something down?
In your soul, I found a thirst
With only salt inside your cup
In your eyes, I saw a longing
While I longed to lift you up

Whoa – the lyrics went a little deeper than I realized when I first put this song on the playlist. At first it was all about the gentle mood of the music, the atmosphere it conjured – but reading through these words make it all cut a little deeper. I suppose that’s the real province of summer: crux and conflict – the crossed and the conflicted. The search for summer solace.

Only when I see you cry
I feel conflicted in my mind
It fills my heart up and it breaks me at the very same time
When you open up the gates for me
And leave the world behind
We find proof of love is hidden
In the conflict of the mind

Let us seek out that solace in beauty and grace, in mindfulness and meditation. Let us find it in the garden, in a book, in a lazy day by the pool – all simple pleasures, all at hand sooner or later in the season of summer. Even in the rain there is joy to be found – maybe it’s in the break and pause the rainfall provides, when it’s impossible to work outside or go for a swim. Little joys. Little bits of balm. Little pieces of solace. 

Don’t let your spirit die
This is just a conflict of the mind (conflict of the mind)
Is your heart alive? (Is your heart alive?)
You’ll overcome a conflict of the mind (conflict of the mind)
Don’t let your spirit die (love is, let your spirit die)
This is just a conflict of the mind (love is, conflict of the mind)
Is your heart alive? (Love, is your heart alive?)
You’ll overcome a conflict of the mind (conflict of the mind)
Don’t let your spirit die (love is, let your spirit die)
This is just a conflict of the mind (love is you, conflict of the mind)
Is your heart alive? (Love, is your heart alive?)
You’ll overcome a conflict of the mind (love is you)

Love is you
Love is you
Love is, love, love
Love is you
Love

Ahh, summer.

Welcome again.

Your heat, your sun, your love…

It’s simply divine.

Heavenly. And that puts us in the mind-frame of a song – a song that fits snugly into our coquette theme with its dreamy stylings and lush melody. 

“Coquettes are, but too rare. It is a career that requires great abilities, infinite pains, a gay and airy spirit. ‘Tis the coquette who provides all the amusements – suggests the riding-party, plans the picnic, gives and guesses charades, acts them. She is the stirring element amid the heavy congeries of social atoms – the soul of the house, the salt of the banquet.” – Benjamin Disraeli

Wanting your love to come into me
Feeling it slow, over this dream
Touch me with a kiss, touch me with a kiss

Now you’re above feeling it still
Tell me it’s love, tell me it’s real
Touch me with a kiss, feel me on your lips

Because this is where I want to be
Where it’s so sweet and heavenly

I’m giving you all my, giving you all my
Giving you all my love
Giving you all my, giving you all my
Giving you all my love
All my love

Summer so sweet, summer so heavenly. Summer so rife with memories… of Montana, of what must have been love, of getting pantsed and showing off my rear, of pride and guilt, of picking the beans, and of reading the rainbow. Summer is adept at seering certain moments into the memory. They remain embedded more powerfully than what happened yesterday, part of my make-up in a way that other memories can only echo. Summer makes for forever.

Needing you now to come into me
Feeling it slow, over this dream
Touch me with a kiss, feel me on your lips

When you’re above feeling it still
Tell me it’s love, tell me it’s real
Touch me with a kiss, touch me with a kiss

Because this is where I want to be
Where it’s so sweet and heavenly

This heavenly song and moment work to forge another memory of love. Summer works that magic perhaps better than any other season. Summer makes us dance, it makes us want more. Summer makes us have fun, and start all sorts of adventures. It makes us want to play. And it makes us want to listen.

I’m giving you all my, giving you all my
Giving you all my love
Giving you all my, giving you all my
Giving you all my love
All my love

And when you’re far away, I still feel it all
And when you’re far away, I still feel it all the same

And when you’re far away, far away

Summer brings us back to childhood in the best possible way, burning away sadness and angst with a rose-tinted flame that gives light to all that was dark. For that reason alone, let us have summer, and let it burn brilliantly into our memory banks – with fire, with heat, with love…

I’m giving you all my, giving you all my
Giving you all my love
Giving you all my, giving you all my
Giving you all my love

Somewhere in some other galaxy, on some other iteration of this website long-ago deleted and written over, this song had some far more innocent blog post to go along with it. I’m old enough to remember when Paris Hilton released it, back when I had little to no respect for her, and it was so good that I played it out for the whole summer of 2006. I don’t remember what I wrote about it then, only that it was one of the summer songs that I featured during the sunny time of the year. It came when the days were carefree, when the nights were filled with pool parties and friends and newly-planted gardens. It was a song reflective of such innocence – the musical embodiment of summer, when music made the memories that would last the longest. 

I don’t mind spending some time just hanging here with you
‘Cause I don’t find too many guys that treat me like you do
Those other guys all wanna take me for a ride
But when I walk, they talk of suicide
Some people never get beyond their stupid pride
But you can see the real me inside, and I’m satisfied…

On this evening before summer officially starts, the songs gets an updated treatment with Paris’ Version, which brings it neatly into our pink-hued coquette theme while largely retaining its original innocence. That’s not as easy as it might seem, even with the arrival of summer again; the innocent coquette is not necessarily an oxymoron, but one must work for it not to be. 

Even though the gods are crazy
Even though the stars are blind
If you show me real love, baby, I’ll show you mine
I can make it nice and naughty
Be the devil and angel too
Got a heart and soul and body
Let’s see what this love can do
Maybe I’m perfect for you

Baby, baby, I could be your confidante
Come on over, show me if you’re down or not
That’s hot, make your whole jaw drop
Give you all that talk, finna ride with Paris
Outta everybody in the galaxy
You’re the only one I really want with me
Let’s sip, we like princesses
In the Miu Miu fits with the horse and carriage

Why shouldn’t we be with the ones we really love?
Now tell me, who have you been dreamin’ of?

The summer of 2006 feels so long ago, and many summers have come and gone since then, so much life – sprouting and growing and blooming and maturing – and now it feels like the years of fading have begun. That makes things glow differently, and in this second half of life, should I be so lucky to be hovering around the halfway mark (for nothing is ever guaranteed) I’m preparing for all the things a proper second act should be. 

Even though the gods are crazy
Even though the stars are blind
If you show me real love, baby
I’ll show you mine
I can make it nice and naughty
Be the devil and angel too
Got a heart and soul and body
Let’s see what this love can do (Oh no)
Maybe I’m perfect for you

Like our modern coquette aesthetic this song reaches into the past while reimagining a freshness and newness not entirely unlike a virgin. It’s a lovely way of honoring the final evening of spring, and the night that will see us into summer. 

Newly-obsessed with Stevie Nicks (thanks to attending my second show in under week) I’m combining our coquette summer theme (which fittingly features its own dose of lace) with her song ‘Leather and Lace‘. There’s a compelling story behind how that song came to be, but I won’t spoil it for anyone who might be going to see her live (and absolutely everyone should). I’ll simply post the song here as it’s currently my favorite of her many iconic musical moments, and for once I find the song, and its lyrics, to be more serious and thoughtful than any of my silly words or stories.

Is love so fragile and the heart so hollow?
Shatter with words, impossible to follow
You’re saying I’m fragile, I try not to be
I search only for something I can’t see
I have my own life
And I am stronger than you know

But I carry this feeling
When you walked into my house
That you won’t be walking out the door
Still I carry this feeling
When you walked into my house
That you won’t be walking out the door

Lovers forever, face to face
My city, your mountains
Stay with me, stay
I need you to love me, I need you today
Give to me your leather
Take from me my lace

You in the moonlight
With your sleepy eyes
Would you ever love a woman like me?
And you were right
When I walked into your house
I knew I’d never want to leave

Most of us are a little leather and little lace in one, and in our relationships with each other we might lean toward one side or the other, but every relationship I know and have been in has found one person assuming both roles at various points. That’s certainly true of my marriage – there are times when each of us has to be stronger because of what the other person might be going through, and such balance is a very good thing. 

Sometimes I’m a strong woman
Sometimes cold and scared and sometimes I cry
But that time I saw you
I knew with you to light my nights
Somehow I would get by

The first time I saw you
I knew with you to light my nights
Somehow I would get by

And so we have this sweet love song as we near the end of spring – not the sort of love song to accompany the start of something, but a more resonant and lasting notion of love to embody the potent glowing embers of a love that has survived the wear and tear of decades. Even leather breaks down after all that time, and lace is sometimes better at allowing poisonous winds to travel right through it instead of taking it all in. Which is stronger in the end? Both might be needed to make it through this life’s journey. 

Lovers forever, face to face
My city, your mountains
Stay with me, stay
I need you to love me, I need you today
Give to me your leather
Take from me my lace

Lovers forever, face to face
My city, your mountains
Stay with me, stay
Well, I need you to love me, I need you today
To give to me your leather
Take from me my lace

The world has gotten entirely too serious for our coquette leanings, and when it threatens to take us all down, I find it best to let loose and put on some ‘Strawberry Bounce’ from Janet Jackson’s under-appreciated ‘Damita Jo’ album. It also provides the opportunity to post a few mouth-watering pictures of the first batch of fresh strawberries that Andy found at Gade Farm. ‘Tis the damn season! And it’s Friday too!!

Let’s have our strawberry silliness.

I like to make it (bounce)
You know I’ll make it (bounce)
Now can you take it? (Bounce, bounce)
Lose control…

I liked strawberries more as a kid than I do now – not that I mind them in the least, I’m simply not quite as enamored. Back then, strawberry was my favorite flavor in the Chocolate/Vanilla/Strawberry trio of a Neapolitan ice cream carton. Whenever given the option of vanilla or chocolate, I would choose strawberry. Turns out I’ve been rejecting binary options my whole life long. 

Gyrate then spin it like a yo-yo
Slap the back and jiggle it like Jell-O
Honey, if you came for a show
I’mma make you lose control…

As for the ‘Strawberry Bounce’ of Damita Jo’s pumping ditty, indulge in these profound lyrics, give in to this sick beat, and hang on to spring like it’s gonna leave next week…

Ooh-wee, baby
My lips as sweet as honey
When I put it in your face
Gonna make you spend your money, uh-huh
Come on or you’re gonna miss it
Ding-dong, don’t you want to kiss it (lose control)

The first installment of our Coquette Summer Music Playlist included this beauty by Air, entitled ‘Alone in Kyoto’. It gives a lovely lilt to a late spring afternoon which has turned warmer than I dared to dream about. This song plays on a day that feels like summer. Without words, the delicate melody floats in the air, providing room for your own contemplative mental meanderings. That’s not always a great thing for people who dwell too much in their minds, ruminating and perseverating and reeling with overthinking. At those moments, and I have a few over the course of any given day, I will return to a singular focus on mindfulness.

Taking each moment and minute as it comes, redirecting my attention to my breathing, on the sole idea of the breath – the inhalation, the pause, the exhalation, the pause, and the inhalation again – one continuous river of survival, where peace can always be found if you know how to look for it. 

Our coquette summer hasn’t even officially begun, but the notion of melancholy masked in beauty is timeless and unbound by seasonal shifts or demarcations. 

Our coquette summer is off to an early start with a little reunion of the kids who attended my office’s ‘Take Your Children To Work Day’ extravaganza this year. Their group got along so well that I proposed a follow-up hang-out with a coquette theme, since the kids seemed to know more about coquette than I did, and the only way to stay young is to keep up on such themes. With that, this song from the Coquette Summer Playlist the 1st, perfect for a moon-filled night:

Moon, a hole of light
Through the big top tent up high
Here before and after me
Shinin’ down on me

Moon, tell me if I could
Send up my heart to you?
So, when I die, which I must do
Could it shine down here with you?

Emi selected this song, as she did most of the songs on the first summer playlist, and it has a lovely, laid-back vibe to it – the perfect backdrop to today’s gathering. If there is rain, that will only add to the underlying shadows of the coquette theme. it is worth remembering that behind the clouds, the moon is still there. 

‘Cause my love is mine, all mine
I love mine, mine, mine
Nothing in the world belongs to me
But my love mine, all mine, all mine
My baby, here on earth
Showed me what my heart was worth
So, when it comes to be my turn
Could you shine it down here for her?

‘Cause my love is mine, all mine
I love mine, mine, mine
Nothing in the world belongs to me
But my love mine, all mine
Nothing in the world is mine for free
But my love mine, all mine, all mine

A nostalgic throwback is best heard deeper into the evening. When dusk falls, so gloriously later in the daily run of the clock, it brings tales back to mind that may or may not have happened. In my childhood, the search for adventure or drama of any kind was a product of too many soap operas and an overactive imagination. Both were enough to sustain me through the summer, the former accompanied by fans, raspberry hard candies and Crystal Light iced tea – the latter inspired by songs that hinted at the love I was on the cusp of wanting. 

Hold me, kiss me,
Whisper sweetly
That you love me
Forever.

I didn’t know then how lucky I was to be wanting for drama, to have to conjure and create mystery and intrigue and difficulty because nothing new seemed to be happening in my life. Such carefree days and nights are the province of youth, and largely wasted upon it. 

And so I indulged in listening to songs that spoke of love and heartache and all the feelings I thought I wanted to experience first-hand. The romanticism and folly of being young… the almost-innocence of being a teenager somewhere between spring and summer…

Hold me, kiss me,
Whisper sweetly
That you love me
Forever.

We are scheduled to hold our first coquette-themed gathering of friends this weekend, and while sun would be ideal, the forecast calls for a cool rain. Maybe that’s more fitting for the coquette theme anyway – the underlying moodiness of it, as personified in a song like ‘Saturn’ by SZA. I have it on good authority that this song is true to the coquette aesthetic, which seems to go just slightly deeper than its beautiful outside trappings. That’s a theme that can become dear to one’s heart.

Life’s better on Saturn
Got to break this pattern
Of floating away
Ooh (ooh, ooh)
Find something worth saving
It’s all for the taking
I always say

I’ll be better on Saturn
None of this matters
Dreaming of Saturn, oh.

There’s a freshness at this time of the year, just as spring prepares to retire and let summer finally take her place. It’s a freshness that masks the mixed emotions that sometimes accompany a switch of seasons, so I don’t often feel the conflicted nature of the crux. Summer sun hides more than it reveals. 

And I haven’t quite yet decided if I’m ready for summer – which won’t slow its arrival in the slightest, merely color how I navigate the early days. I’ll come around eventually, I usually do… In the meantime, when there are rainy days and dismal weather, I’ll turn on the coquette coziness, spray a little ‘Carnal Flower’, and bloom, bloom, bloom… while revisiting the sort of sunny day captured in these pictures. 

The last few weeks of school before summer vacation often played confusing games with my mind. As much as I wanted out, as much as I wanted the drudgery and worry and strain of school to be done, June also made me want to slow things down. Faced with the prospect of freedom, suddenly I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. There were spells of enchantment in every school year, and friends who made their mark in my life. All of us had gone through the same trauma and drama in ways that bound us to each other like no one would again. That tender part of one’s life, those formative and impressionable years – I sensed then that they might not ever be repeated, and every June I felt them slip further away. 

I’m a high school lover
And you’re my favorite flavor
Love is all, all my soul
You’re my playground love

Our playgrounds shifted and changed, from the other-worldly, gaudily-painted steel flowers and caterpillars and mushrooms of kindergarten, to the wooden climbing houses and shadowy covered slides, to the almost-adult tracks and courts of high school, just as our play moved from the outside world to the inside of our heads. 

Through those high school corridors, my mind travels back into the past. The hallways feel dimmer in my head than they looked the last time I was in the building. Hazier and more dangerous too, filled with the people who tormented my mind more than they ever troubled me in person, the way most demons wreak their havoc – lazily relying on you to fill in the frightening blanks. And I would always give them more ferocity and power than they ever really held. 

Yet my hands are shaking
I feel my body remains
Time’s no matter, I’m on fire
On the playground, love

Though I could not see it or fully feel it at the time – there was only a vague sense of it – I held my own power too. It was there in the way most teachers appreciated my rapt attention to their every word, there in the compliments garnered from my outfits, there in the gaze of a guy who watched me change in the locker room for gym class, his eyes glued to me no matter how long I waited for him to leave before hastily pulling off my khakis and slipping into sweat pants. Power operated on all planes and playgrounds – we each had some, and we each used it in different ways. We were just starting to see, to learn, to play…

You’re the piece of gold
That flashes on my soul
Extra time, on the ground
You’re my playground love

Anytime, anyway
You’re my playground love…

{Hear more coquette music here.}