So this month’s playlist is about, well, months. Basically there are a couple of good songs about September that I like, and I just went from there. It’s 10 songs, and not all months are represented, but it’s a theme, right?
As usual, you can listen along on Spotify.
- Green Day – “Wake Me Up When September Ends”. This was the fourth single from Green Day’s seventh (and in my opinion best) studio album, American Idiot.
- Earth, Wind and Fire – “September”. A classic disco track that seems to be in about every third Tiktok video that I’ve come across this month.
- U2 – “October”. This is an older U2 single from 1981, and was the title track from their second album. Unlike most well-known U2 tracks, this is a piano track with limited vocals.
- Wyclef Jean – “Gone Till November”. I’ve included the ‘pop’ version as this is the one I remember from watching MTV in the 1990s when this came out. A more downbeat song from Wyclef’s other contemporaneous singles like “It Doesn’t Matter” and “Perfect Gentleman”.
- Neck Deep – “December”. Note some spicy language in this one. I first came across this in December 2019, when I was going through a bit of a rough time (some job insecurity, problems with this blog and a bad general election result) and this song was, as they say, a ‘mood’.
- Foo Fighters – “February Stars”. Into the new year; I couldn’t find anything interesting for January so here’s an album track from the Foo Fighters second album. It’s another slower track, which seems to inadvertently be something of a theme with songs named after months.
- Delain – “April Rain”. This is the fourth time Delain has popped up on one of these playlists of the month, which isn’t a coincidence. We’ve seen them live twice in their original line-up and they used to be one of my favourite bands. April Rain was the first of their singles that I encountered and remains one of my favourites of theirs; it’s the first single from their second album.
- BT – “Flaming June”. A big change of genre here as this is some trance from American musician Brian Transeau, better known as BT. This was a collaboration with German producer Paul van Dyk, and was a big hit at the time – it used to be a regular on Dave Pearce’s Dance Anthems show on BBC Radio 1 on Sunday nights.
- Take That – “Sweet July”. The newest song on this playlist, having come out in, you guessed it, this July as the second single from Take That’s tenth album. It’s a funky pop song.
- Taylor Swift – “August”. With Taylor Swift having released 12 studio albums in her 20 year career, it’s not surprising that I would find one of her songs to fit a theme. This is from her 2020 downbeat album Folklore.
