Timeless Bangers, Part 3 – 2024 / Week 3 of January Recommended Playlist
Meow meow, hi everyone! Welcome back~ Today is the third week of January in our weekly playlist series! Sorry about this one, things have been crazy busy lately so the playlist got pushed back until now, and I’m still slowly catching up. But good news: the band feature you all voted for last time, “Oh, I See What You Mean,” is ready to go, and it’ll be published the day after tomorrow! Okay, enough rambling… let’s get started!
2024 / January Week 3 Recommended Playlist – YouTube / Spotify
YouTube playlist:
Spotify playlist:
Listen and read along on the site (for those of you without Premium):
“What Do You Mean?” by Justin Bieber
Alright! Today our first song is “What Do You Mean?” by Justin Bieber. I’m guessing everyone knows this one already! I’ve been listening to it since high school all the way up to now, and it’s still on my playlist today. Sometimes I’ll even pull it up just to hear it again. For me, what I love most is the vibe it gives me, and this line: “What do you mean? When you nod your head yes, But you wanna say no. What do you mean? Heeey. When you don’t want me to move, But you tell me to go.” (As in: what is it you actually want? When you nod yes, but really want to say no. What do you mean? When you want me to stay by your side, but tell me to get lost anyway.)
This song is about Justin and Selena Gomez and what their relationship was like, but honestly I think it’s the story of every guy out there. We can never quite figure out what the other person actually wants, and whenever something feels off, we can never get a straight answer out of them. Those “whatever”s and “anything’s fine”s… I think only girls themselves know what they really mean.
“What Do I Know” by Ed Sheeran
The second song has a title that’s almost identical to the first: “What Do I Know” by Ed Sheeran. This one might not be super famous, but for me it’s a real classic! Back in high school I had this on insane loop, and I once wanted to learn it on piano to play for someone I had a crush on, but the chance slipped away before I ever got it down. Boo hoo hoo. As for where the song came from, Ed Sheeran mentioned in an interview that it was his comeback to an incident he got caught up in a while back. Basically, there was a time he was defending a friend (from the interview it sounded politics-related), but people slammed him with “shut up and just sing your songs.” Hurt by it all, he wrote this song.
The song is basically about how he’s got nothing: no pedigree, no education, no real influence. While everyone’s racing to see who can make it big faster, all he thinks about is how to come up with lyrics and how to make the world a little more loving. In the interview he even said, “My life motto has always been that ‘love is everything,’ and I like it when people are happy.” I really love the positive energy this song gives me. It’s perfect for kicking off your day in a relaxed way.
“While I’ll be sitting here with a song that I wrote. Saying love could change the world in a moment, But what do I know? Love can change the world in a moment, But what do I know?” (Meaning: yet here I’ll sit, singing the song I wrote, tirelessly saying “love can change the world in a moment.” But what do I know? “Love can flip the world in the blink of an eye,” but really, what do I know?)
“Galway Girl” by Ed Sheeran
Alright, time really flies! Next up is our third song of the day. Whenever I think of Ed Sheeran, this song “Galway Girl” comes to mind. It cleverly weaves together the violin, the bodhrán drum, and other instruments to create a song with a sound that’s really different from the mainstream, and it’s both super easy to listen to over and over and deeply close to my heart. For me, my favorite part is of course the line that repeats several times throughout: “You know, she played the fiddle in an Irish band, But she fell in love with an English man. Kissed her on the neck and then I took her by the hand. Said, ‘Baby, I just want to dance'”
(She played the fiddle in an Irish band, but fell in love with a lad from England. I kissed her on the neck and took her by the hand. Baby, just dance with me.) The “Galway Girl” in here is, you could say, a fiddle player named Niamh Dunne from the band Beoga.
But why “you could say”? Mainly because the only thing in the whole song that actually happened is the first line, “She played the fiddle in an Irish band.” Everything else was made up. Even so, he manages to tell it so convincingly and describe it so beautifully. I think in a way that’s pretty impressive, right?
“Paris” by The Chainsmokers
The next song is from another really famous group, The Chainsmokers, and it’s called “Paris.” I think Paris is the second song of theirs I’ve featured, after Closer! I’m sure plenty of people have heard this one, but probably not as many actually know it’s called this. The interesting thing is that the surface of this song and the story behind it are worlds apart. It wasn’t until I did my homework on it that I realized just how profound the backstory is.
This song is about a friend of Andrew Taggart’s from the East Coast. That friend had been suffering from drug addiction for years, and the friend’s parents would always update Andrew on how the friend was doing lately. But the friend had no idea his parents were telling Andrew all of this, and would casually mention his own situation to Andrew like everything was normal. Maybe he didn’t even realize he had a drug addiction himself?!
Anyway, this friend sparked the idea behind the song, and they used “Paris,” the city in France, as a metaphor, because Paris is a bit of an “over-idealized place.” In most people’s imagination, Paris is this romantic capital, but between that ideal and that romance hide all the messy human realities and all kinds of desires. So as they put it in an interview, “the song is about escaping reality, a reality that often lacks excitement, escaping to another place in your mind together with someone else.”
My favorite part of this song is of course “If we go down then we go down together. They’ll say you could do anything, They’ll say that I was clever. If we go down then we go down together. We’ll get away with everything. Let’s show them we are better.” (If we’re going down, then let’s go down together. They say you can do whatever you want. They say I’m clever. If we’re going to fall, let’s fall together. We’ll get away from it all. Let’s show them we’re better than they think.)
“I Really Like You” by Carly Rae Jepsen
Next up is “I Really Like You” by Carly Rae Jepsen. This song is about that stage where you’ve gone past just liking someone, but you’re not quite at loving them yet. That in-between is what you’d call the “I really really really really really really like you” phase. So cute! My favorite part of the song is of course “It’s way too soon, I know this isn’t love. But I need to tell you something. I really really really really really really like you, And I want you, do you want me, do you want me, too?” (It’s way too soon, I know this isn’t love. But there’s something I have to tell you. I really really really really really really like you. I just want you, and you accept me too, you accept me too, right?) The one thing I find weird about this song is that in the MV the singing voice is a woman’s, but the person acting it out is a man, and to make it look less strange, they added lip-syncing on top. Overall it comes across as… pretty surreal.
“All About That Bass” by Meghan Trainor
The next song I want to introduce is by another artist I really love, Meghan Trainor, and it’s called “All About That Bass.” That super catchy “all about that bass” made me fall hard for this singer, and I went and listened to her other songs too. If I get the chance, I’ll definitely introduce them to you all. The thing is, the line that shows up most in this song, “I’m all about that bass, no treble,” is actually a subtle reference to Meghan’s own body. Being a little curvier made her, back when she first started writing lyrics, constantly feel she’d never have a shot at making it, and that she’d only ever be the kind of person who writes lyrics for others. This song is kind of like telling yourself that you’re really not bad at all, wanting to win back your confidence and fight back against that pessimistic version of yourself.
On top of that, the song is also all about low notes, so “all about that bass” also carries the meaning of “I’ve naturally got a low voice.” It’s a song that works read from either angle. My favorite part, of course, is this: “Yeah it’s pretty clear, I ain’t no size 2. Yeah, But I can shake it, shake it like I’m supposed to do. Cause I got that boom boom that all the boys chase. All the right junk in all the right places.” (Clearly, I’m definitely not a slim figure, but I can still shake it, shaking every part of me just like everyone else. Because I’ve got the kind of fiery rhythm every boy dreams of, and every move lands just right.) It really has that “this is just how I look, what are you gonna do about it” kind of unshakable confidence.
“A Sky Full Of Stars” by Coldplay
Alright, before we knew it we’ve reached our last song of the day. Thank you all for sticking with me until now! This is a song I used to play as my “ending” every single night. I’d close my textbook, quietly listen to it, and then go to sleep. I picked up this habit because another singer I really love, Avicii, used to close his concerts with this song, so I just copied the move. It always gives me this feeling of, “well, another day’s gone by; no matter how hard it was, you can rest now.”
In an interview, Chris Martin also mentioned, “This song represents that letting-loose feeling after you’ve finished climbing a mountain, or after you’ve completed anything challenging. That’s why this song is so unabashedly happy and danceable, because that’s exactly the feeling it’s going for.” “Cause you’re a sky. Cause you’re a sky full of stars. I want to die in your arms. Cause you get lighter, The more it gets dark. I’m going to give you my heart.” (Because you’re a sky. Because you’re a sky full of stars. I want to grow old in your arms. The brighter you shine, the darker everything around looks, so I’ll entrust my heart to you.) I really love this part, because it falls right after the interlude, that feeling of everything settling back into calm.
Thanks so much for tuning in! That’s it for this week’s playlist. Sorry it went up so late; I accidentally overslept a bit at noon! That’s all for now, see you next week! Oh, and tomorrow there’ll be an article I really love, so I hope to see you over there too. See you then, mai-de-mian (bye-bye)!
Mydondon’s new playlist bucket (the whole-leg combo):
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/0FDzzruyVECATHXKHFs9eJ?si=44e88187f04c4ecc
YouTube:
Other recommended playlists:
https://mydondon.net/category/entertainment/playlist/
Don’t feel like reading an article with so many words? My IG has curated picture posts:
https://www.instagram.com/hikids1010/
The references for this episode are here: