In what became a pretty prophetic vision for how much of a struggle it was finding time for this blog as life became completely unhinged, for as enthusiastically as I both started and finished the D’s, and as excited as I was to finally begin the E’s, I had every intention of live-tweeting highlights from this letter, until I was suddenly 77 songs deep. And then 98. And then I was going back to play new favorite stretches and songs, like “Earthquake Weather” and “Earthquakes and Sharks” and a whole mess of Ea- tracks to ensure I was actually hearing everything instead of relegating it to passive background noise, because new favorites deserve to get played on infinite repeat just as obsessively as old ones do. Which is all part of taking the scenic route to admitting it’s probably fitting that the E’s are going out in a grunt of “Oh shit, how is it already time for the wrap-up!?” (I blame life. And a promotion. And a 93-year-old house. And finally missing people enough to venture some kind of social calendar.)

This whole letter was accompanied by such a weird sense of time, which has little to do with the E’s comprising fewer songs than the other letters so far, or how it kept feeling like I was racing through and losing track of songs when that actually wasn’t happening as much as it felt. I mean, yeah, it doesn’t help that 2020 is entering its 30th month, but I can’t even begin to account for all the times I was gobsmacked by the realization that, whoops, it’s already been three weeks since I last posted. I’m beginning to have serious doubts about my ability to grok the passage of time buuuuut that’s the kind of conversation I should probably pay someone to listen to.

But unintentionally taking my sweet-ass time with the E’s wound up feeling less forgetfully plodding and more meditatively deliberate, giving me more time and mental space to devote to these songs. I backtracked a lot, I fell in love with a lot of belatedly unearthed gems, I eventually realized that alphabetically time-traveling through my music library has become a surprisingly mindful adventure the more of a habit it becomes. I also detoured hard through my newfound love for Jens Lekman and immersion-seeking pursuit of Swedish musicians who actually do sing in Swedish (do yourself a favor and give Effy Simon a listen, even if you’re not seven months into convincing yourself you can learn a Scandinavian language), which definitely made working my way through 317 songs take twice as long as it should have while also underscoring that this whole blog, while ultimately working toward a defined goal, is nothing but unstructured time that can take as long as it wants to in getting where it’s going.

And the E’s were packed with unexpected delights and odd little quirks of chance that made adopting a leisurely stroll along the scenic route pay off, especially the more comfortable I became retracing my steps to make sure I was really hearing these songs. Like, I don’t know if I just like derivative music, if I’m justified in going back to give more attention to the songs that slipped into the background, or if legal weed has cognitive consequences after all, but it turns out that a lot of bands sound like other bands when you’re not paying attention the first couple-three times: I could have sworn Meanwhiles’ “Ecstasy ” was Radiohead; “The Embers Burn” by Flood in the Fizzy Factory—a Vermont-based band I only know about because my husband and I caught one of their sets on our honeymoon—sounded a lot like Eels; I thought Sufjan Steven’s “Eugene” could have passed for an Elliott Smith track; Streetlight Manifesto’s “Everything Went Numb” sounds like everything Gogol Bordello’s ever made all at once.

And then there were seemingly encoded messages that struck me as auspicious, suspicious, hilarious and everything in between. Two consecutive Elliott Smith songs—“Everything Means Nothing to Me” and “Everything Reminds Me of Her” made for as pained and fatalistic of a switched pairing as I expect from the late singer-songwriter. Aloha’s “Everything Goes My Way” being immediately followed by “Everything Goes to Hell” was a fabulously executed and well-timed reminder of why I’ve mandated a ban on certain Tom Waits songs after a certain threshold of evening drunkenness has been breached in our gin-soaked Saturdays. But it was the perpetual optimism of Ben Lee popping up in not only “Everybody Dies” but also “Everything is OK” being tempered by The Decemberist’s “Everything is Awful” that delighted me the most, partly for the screamingly incongruous juxtaposition but mostly for how appropriate such a mood swing is for these weird-ass, tumultuous times we live in that are precariously positioned on the kind of ever-shifting, unsteady footing that demands defiant revelry in the face of a dying planet and terrible world, both of which are still filled with plenty of reasons to sing and dance and give a reckless middle finger to all those forces hellbent on capitalizing on just how bad everything out of our power to change for the better really is. We’re all gonna die and this planet is, too, but preemptive mourning isn’t the way to internalize those inevitabilities. It made going out on a gleefully wailing Hendrix note feel all the more fitting.

With it taking practically all goddamn year to cover the E’s, this shitty world at large certainly imposed itself on this project on a number of occasions, most notably this past winter’s Spotify mass exodus, which I stewed over for a few days while considering what a laborious undertaking it would be to migrate all my playlists and 12,700 Songs content to another platform. In the end, seeing a bunch of smaller indie outfits panic about what a diminished Spotify usage would do to their exposure, the fact that I buy the same albums I stream and my general mistrust of corporate boycotts all placated my conscience enough to make me shrug my shoulders at the whole incident and declare myself justified in not giving a sincere enough shit to change my habits. It might not be the most socially responsible conclusion I’ve ever come to, but I’m at peace with it.

Specific to this blog, I spent a month or two updating each entry’s accompanying art with their corresponding song number for a little bit of personalization/media law in action. Which really means I spent way too much time agonizing over transparency percentages and vertical centers and hunting down high-res album art for albums that only I and, like, five other people genuinely love, let alone even remember.

But the most significant project-specific development came at the end of July, with two E songs and a wrap-up left to write about: My iPod, after almost a decade of reliably steadfast service, rebelled in spectacular fashion, apparently obliterating its lovingly curated contents via the tragedy of a hardware crash and making me realize with dawning horror that, even with two years to do so, I never once thought to back up the 12,700 Songs playlist.

However! All was not lost and what really happened turned out to be a lesson in not charging some geriatric technology’s drained battery with a nearly-as-ancient desktop. What could have been an adventure in reconstructing not only the 12,700 Songs playlist but also the entirety of Slothrop the iPod’s contents (or 13,304 songs) turned out to be a day of panic followed by first the biggest squeal of relief I’ve ever squealed over an inanimate object, and then a flurry of indulging long-overdue failsafes like redundantly copied Excel spreadsheets and hard-drive playlist backups.

Dodged bullets and lessons learned aside, I am so fucking sad that my longest-reigning iPod finally started showing his age and antiquity, especially now that his kind is an endangered species, because of all the difficulties I have with the passage of time, internalizing the inevitably of aging’s decisive sickle coming for everything has been maybe my most persistent hangup of them all. And while that may be another conversation reserved for the company of mental-health professionals, it’s at least a solid reminder not to take those things at the mercy of the aging process for granted. So thank you, whole-heartedly, for being here. Every visitor is such a pleasant and much-appreciated surprise to me, and I hope this self-indulgent project of mine can introduce you to more songs I love.

E Songs
Total: 317 songs
First song “E-Pro” by Beck
Last song: “Ezy Ryder/MLK Jam (Captain Coconut)” by Jimi Hendrix
Shortest song: “Everything Resolves” by Fanfarlo (38 seconds)
Longest song: “Echoes” by Pink Floyd (23:29 minutes)
Most recurring song: “Empire” by Jukebox the Ghost (11.2 minutes) (three versions total)
Most time spent on one song: “Everyday” by Dave Matthews Band (13.1 minutes)
Number of songs not on Spotify: 18
Total playing time (letter): 21.2 hours
Total playing time (cumulative): 8.8 days