Spotify Sunday: Calmly Magnificent

Here let us sweep
The boundless landscape; not the raptur’d eye,
Exulting swift, to huge Augusta send,
Now to the sister-hills that skirt her plain
To lofty Harrow now, and then to where
Majestic Windsor lifts his princely brow.
In lovely contrast to this glorious view,
Calmly magnificent.

James Thomson, ‘Summer’ from The Seasons, 1727

Everyone has a favourite piece of London.  Mine stands along the Terrace Walk, on the north-west prospect of Richmond Hill, the ‘glorious view’ so little changed in nearly three centuries. In the foreground are the bucolic, sloping Terrace Fields and Petersham Meadows.  A diminutive ait, Glover’s Island, floats upon the Thames.  Over the water is the verdure of Marble Hill and Cambridge Park, buildings veiled by slyvan canopies. Summer is when Richmond Hill comes into its own. The grass grows deep, creating secluded nooks and crannies to sit in and pass hours reading, napping, canoodling.

I feel awkwardly unqualified to recommend music. I like music – I even started doing a GCSE in it – but I couldn’t say that I am an expert. And if Cervantes once wrote that he who sings scares away his woes, then there are times when my singing scares away any poor bugger within earshot.

I cannot recommend songs according to style, position in a critical canon, or what the musicians were smoking at the time. It is said that music is what feelings sound like, and these songs all feel like loafing around Richmond Hill, nursing some ale on an airless summer’s day.

There’s nothing complicated in here. The choices all are, as in Thomson’s verse, just calmly magnificent.

April Come She Will – Simon & Garfunkel
A friend played me this for the first time (quel naïf) last summer over a pint on Richmond Hill.  Start with it for no reason other than in two weeks’ time, April she will indeed have come. Keep listening through May, June, July, August until finally, September, by which point ‘a love once new has now grown old.’ This tune never will.

Solsbury Hill – Peter Gabriel
Sunny, winsome and cheerful, this was Peter Gabriel’s first record after quitting Genesis and is probably his best. The steady drumbeat and strum, strum, strum-strum of acoustic guitar make the tune feel purposeful, forward-looking, and yet somehow there’s still something carefree and unhurried about it.  Now just swap ‘Solsbury’ for ‘Richmond’ and you’re on your way.

World Spins Madly On – The Weepies
I have a bit of a thing for folk music groups like The Weepies. Play this on a hot summer’s day and see if, like me, you think the lingering vocals are what a heat haze might sound like. It’s super easy to play on the guitar, too, which is always an advantage.

Flake – Jack Johnson
I listened to this again last summer for the first time in a few years and it brought a smile to my face. Sadly it has become a cliché, but Jack Johnson’s prosaic strumming became the soundtrack of my school and university summers and this song’s the best of the lot, and not just because it doesn’t sound exactly like all the others.

In The Sun – Joseph Arthur
The lyrics to this song can represent anything from saying goodbye (Peter Gabriel covered it for the Princess Diana tribute album) to falling in love. It was even used as a backdrop to justifying Christian faith in one of the more poignant episodes of Scrubs. One to listen to lying on your back, eyes shut, sun on your face. Or anytime you like, really. It is just a very beautiful song.

Sideways – Citizen Cope
A bit of melancholy is no bad thing, from time to time. From the opening bluesy guitar riff, you know this isn’t a happy song but I like to listen to it on those days when you’re a bit down, you’ve got things on your mind, so you pick yourself up and go to wander or sit amongst the trees. The lyrics say these feelings won’t go away, but they always do, and contrarily this song seems to help.

Forever Young – Youth Group
The Australian indie group recorded this cover of the Alphaville original especially for The O.C. and went on to score something of a hit with it Down Under. One very nebulous connection to this and today’s theme is that Alphaville shot the music video at Virginia Water, which with very, very eagle eyes and a freakishly clear day you can see from Richmond Hill. The song is either wistfully sad or powerfully motivating, depending on your mood.

Meaning – Gavin DeGraw
An unreleased track from Chariot (2003), this is the most upbeat of the songs on this playlist. You’re actually more likely to find me running over Richmond Hill to this than lazily lying in the grass. DeGraw’s vocals have a rawness of emotion that, unlike that of a lot of American singer-songwriters of his ilk, stops the right side of whininess.

Welcome Home, Son – Radical Face
Radical Face, AKA Ben Cooper, does all sorts of clever, experimental things with music, the details of which would be lost on me. This, though, is a barnstormer of a song: fast-paced, with a tap-tapa-tap hand clap beat, soaring layered vocals and stirring crescendos. I first came across it around this time last year when it was used as the climactic backing track to Eddie Izzard’s 43 marathons and it became my own motivational melody for the London Marathon. I still have to play it every time I run along the side of Richmond Hill.

Heartbeats – José Gonzalez
This is an infinitely more stripped-down cover of the electronica original by Gonzalez’s Swedish compatriots The Knife. I’d always imagined this as the perfect soundtrack to staring reflectively out of the window on a long bus journey. It should have been played in Babel before Cate Blanchett gets shot. But I digress – this song will work anywhere and anytime you want to gaze contemplatively into the distance.  Most definitely one to bring proceedings to a close and, in the truest sense of all, it is just calmly magnificent.

Nik Darlington is a freelance journalist and historian. He is the editor of the current affairs blog Egremont and is in the early stages of writing his first historical novel. He hopes that by announcing this it will force him actually to get on with writing it. You can follow Nik on Twitter @NikDarlington.

You can listen to the playlist Here.