Daily Jam - Playground Love

You ever make a mixtape for someone? An aural definition of you assembled by bits and pieces of pop radio? A testament of your deepest feelings as conveyed by rock stars, composers, and singer songwriters alike, all presented in an old school, analog tape format? Or maybe just a collection of tunes you think that certain someone might like? I did. I used to do it all the time. I even wrote about it once, a long time ago. Hell, I still make CD-R mixes, agonizing over sequence and flow, to jam in my car on the drive to work because I’m an old person and stuck in my ways. I still feel that there is an underappreciated art to it, especially when dubbing cassettes, and tucked away in boxes in closets in my house are dozens of old tapes I made for myself years ago.

And lo and behold, when my wife was cleaning out some stuff the other day, she came across the empty case for the first tape I made for her. It was an interesting artifact to uncover, with some of the music kind of dated, and the actual tape missing, probably eaten long ago by a car tape deck. But ultimately, it’s still a pretty decent mix, featuring some love songs my then 20-year old heart thought were to die for…except for one glaring omission. Being that I most likely made the tape either at the end of 1999 or the beginning of 2000, I’m aghast at my exclusion.

“Playground Love.”

So far, writing this column (in 2017), I have yet to repeat an artist, but “Playground Love” is just too silky smooth to ignore. Penned for Sofia Coppola’s 1999 film The Virgin Suicides, and included with the score, the song is an absolute gem from French electronic duo Air featuring Gordon Tracks. It’s sexy, and alluring, and feels like some kind of wonderful Godley & Creme homage, all dreamy pining and pangs of teenage lust and love. Gorgeous and haunting, the song is the embodiment of the kind of smoky, lovelorn jam you would put on a youthful and sincere (and maybe a little naïve) mixtape for the object of your desire.

So how the hell did I leave it off of there? To remedy the situation, I suppose a new mixtape should be in the works. Odes to domesticity…and cool, slinky sex songs…and sax. Plenty of sax.

Listen below, our Daily Jam.