Around the time the shelter at home and nonessential business closure orders started to go into effect,  pandemic music playlists seemed to appear nearly everywhere on online. After looking over a few of the lists, I decided to stop perusing them because of the need to create one totally to my taste, with as little outside influence as possible. It also didn’t help that certain songs — most notably R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” — just seemed way too ubiquitous and obvious.

So, my list started with Warren Zevon’s “Life’ll Kill Ya,” because… Well, how could you not start with a song by an artist who wrote so much about death? From there, I added another every day or so until the list reached 10 songs, and then progress stalled for a couple weeks. Then, a couple evenings ago, while throwing dinner together in the kitchen with Sally, we were listening to a playlist of adult contemporary songs when two additional songs caught our attention and seemed to be good fits for the list.

Work on my pandemic playlist still isn’t complete. It seems like whatever the final list is, it shouldn’t take more time than the length of a standard CD. Once it contains enough songs, we’ll figure the best possible play order as well. In the meantime, the following songs will be included:

“Life’ll Kill Ya,” Warren Zevon
“Rats,” Ghost
“99.9F°,” Suzanne Vega
“(Nothing but) Flowers,” Talking Heads
“Someone to Love,” Fountains of Wayne
“Everything Is Awful,” The Decemberists
“Germs”, “Weird Al” Yankovic
“No One Lives Forever,” Oingo Boingo
“High Hopes,” Bruce Springsteen
“Burn the Castle,” New Model Army
“Stuck in the Middle,” Stealers Wheel
“A Life of Illusion,” Joe Walsh

When it’s completed, I’ll revisit this post and provide some additional commentary. In the meantime, there may actually be a post that’s not part of the Notes From the Pandemic series.