When at work, Spotify has become my new best friend, and I’ve had a lot of fun putting together my own playlists. And, because I’m an egotistical jerk, I thought perhaps these lists should be shared. So, if you use Spotify and would like a little new music, may I present:

It’s a Happy Sort of Retro Day (link)
28 tracks, 1 hours

When I was a kid, my parents listened to one radio station, and one station only: 98.1 WKQQ, more habitually known as “Double Q.” They listened to this station with such dedication and frequency that they were once perfectly poised to have their four-year-old daughter get on the phone and sing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song to the DJs and win them four tickets to King’s Island amusement park. The DJs were, of course, duly impressed.

Sadly, Double Q no longer makes its home at 98.1, and since Clear Channel basically owns everything radio these days, I’m sure the playlists are too corporate to bear much resemblance to the stuff I remember being in regular rotation back then. But no matter. I’ve made my own list.

Granted this list is compiled based on child-memory, which can be vivid and perfectly detailed, but also completed distorted and rather indiscriminate in its willingness to merge dissonant instances into singular units. So while a lot of these songs were definitely Double Q fare, some are just songs that I remember from my early childhood and really loved. That’s the way.

Order on this one is not so important, so feel free to shuffle. But you might want to save that Peter Frampton epic for last.