What’s This Playlist All About? Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl helps us keep our sanity in quarantine with 10 songs devoted to each stage and emotion we’re all likely experiencing during this unprecedented time of anxiety and isolation. He also offers a few quick words of advice: “Go wash your fucking hands.”
What You Get: The Cars kick this off with the buoyant New Wave groove “Let’s Go,” which then seamlessly flows into Madness’s horn-happy ode to the abode “Our House,” an apt song for easing into the second stage of nesting. From there, the Ahmad Jamal Quintet offer some smooth jazz to push your productivity, LCD Soundsystem forces you to move, The Art of Noise inspire some romance, and Patsy Cline sums up all the feelings in under three minutes with “Crazy,” before The Beatles help us see the light (and the sun) at the end of this scary, maddening, claustrophobic tunnel.
Strangest Pick: Grohl slips in a Yuletide gem for stage 8—panic—perhaps because a little childhood nostalgia may be our only source of comfort. “You might as well put on ‘Linus and Lucy,’ by the Vince Guaraldi Trio, make gingerbread cookies, and wait for the aliens,” he writes.
Best Foo Fighters Song to Wash Your Hands To: What Grohl doesn’t give us here is a song for the many times we find ourselves sudsed up at the sink. We’re going to go with Foo Fighters’ inspirational “Times Like These.” Go ahead, sing along: “It’s times like these you learn to live again/It’s times like these you give and give again/It’s times like these you learn to love again/It’s times like these time and time again.”
