The Obvious LA Songbook: playlist

This blog post almost seems redundant because all the music I listen to with a few exceptions could probably go onto this playlist. That’s what this whole dumb website is about, right? Anyway, I’m going to LA tomorrow and wanted to add one more playlist to my collection of 900million. I actually made the ultimate on-the-nose LA mixtape on a cassette when I was about 13 years old – Beverly Hills by Weezer, Free Fallin, Beck, all that stuff. My best friend loves to make fun of the time we drove to LA and all the way from West Covina to Santa Monica, I sang her a song about every street. Growing up enamored with the Laurel Canyon scene, listening to all these songs and then getting to go there and see them in real life added to the surreal lush magic of the city. This playlist is a more updated version of that mixtape I made in 2002. I avoided adding full albums and anything that isn’t explicitly about LA itself, avoiding my own projections and associations. That’s a playlist for another time. This playlist isn’t all necessarily Californiana, as I conceptualize it, but I think it’s all songs made by anyone who has ever felt homesick for it.