Welcome to another installment of Playlists To Make Running Suck Less – a compiled, culled and collated 156-176 (or 78×2 – 88×2) BPM playlist! This playlist provides about an hour’s worth of metronoming your running stride (that is, if your stride is somewhere in the ballpark of 5′ 8″ with a 32″ inseam) and drowning out your joints’ wailing and gnashing of teeth (you know, if they had teeth) to the dulcet sounds of tracks you didn’t have to exert any calories in pulling together. So let’s get to it; of course if even a brief blurb about a handful of the tracks is tl;dr for you, jump right to the playlist!
The Academic’s “Different” and The Weepies’ “No Trouble” are right on the BPM south end (156) of stride-length I can manage without leaping like a panicked gazelle, but they’re great for warm-up, cool-down or just getting in a few minutes of gazelling mid-run. On the other hand, Go! Team’s “The Scene Between” is right at my upper limit of tolerable BPM (88 x 2 or 176) and ended up an effective feet-mover while zipping through a mile of crushed-limestone trail that had a fair bit of slurpy mucky areas to dodge. Normally I would pick my way at turtle-pace through such sloppy mess, but at that BPM there was no choice but hop on through like a football player through a tire drill.
One track will bring to mind Matthew McConaughey chest-beating in Wolf of Wall Street, I’ll leave you to sort out which one.
As far as I’m concerned, no time isn’t the time for Neil Diamond, but running through the mud-colored, leaf-bare Minnesota-in-March landscape to Solitary Man is a thing of beauty. And in honor of Hall & Oates’ bubbling up into our headlines this month (and because, like Neil Diamond, it’s never NOT time for Hall & Oates), I’ve included two Philly soul favorites that land in the BPM sweet spot.
I’ve even got space cowboys and androids in this month’s playlist with Janelle Monae’s “Cold War” (and if Janelle Monae doesn’t make the blocks fly by, well brb we’re breaking up with you)…
Image may be NSFW.
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…and Kenny Roger’s “Planet Texas,” the latter being the best song you’ve never heard from Kenny Rogers. Come on – “I knew they were the good guys, yessir you got it right, cuz their cowboy hats was white,” that’s some legit classic country right there, people. And you can run easy knowing that back when this track was released, Mr. Rogers’ eyes hadn’t yet ridden off into the sunset.
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On the left, Kenny circa “Planet Texas”; on the right, well let’s not speak of it again.
Overall 8 new releases (thanks Spotify New Music Tuesday!), plus Regina Spektor, The Police, and a scrum of other tracks that will keep you slogging on through spring.
Favorite tracks of this month’s mix: The Sounds’ “Lost in Love” and “The World Ender” by Lord Huron.
Without any further ado, this month’s playlist:
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