So, so much happened during this letter that wound up plagued by bookending, recurring technical issues that ranged from figuring out what mystery song I somehow deleted from the 12,700 Songs playlist-as-a-spreadsheet to a decade-old desktop refusing to spring back to life for a brief but frustrating spell after some blip of a power outage, effectively cutting me off from the absolutely ancient (but completely mine!) version of Photoshop I use for this site’s low-effort art. I accepted a long time ago that being a luddite in a tech-obsessed world just means pissing off machines more than the average user, but this was an especially wild bunch of encounters where buzzy and electric gadgets brought out the side of me that usually only driving does.

Hey, speaking of driving! The upside to my trusty metal steed finally giving up the ghost on the side of a heavily traveled interstate during rush hour the night before flying across the country to visit my BFF meant finally upgrading to a car made in the same decade I’m living in, heralding the long-overdue introduction of this project to my daily commute after nearly three years of listening to the 12,700 Songs playlist mostly at home and sometimes at work. I’d actually just finally equipped my late 2006 Santa Fe (a vehicle as old as my college degree, BTW) with the already-outdated Spotify Car Thing mere weeks before its engine literally went up in smoke, then trotted out my iPod while driving my MIL’s tape-deck-adapter-equipped boat of a 2000 Mercury Marquis until acquiring a new car, and then back to the Car Thing before figuring out how to connect my also-new phone to the just-barely-pre-pandemic Nissan Rouge I initially fell in love with for the very technical reason that it’s the same car bestie has.

Which is the long setup to realizing that driving along to these songs is a whole different experience. I’m not a monster so I’m not doing a million other things when the only thing I should be focused on is safely maneuvering me and my automobile across a state lousy with both homegrown and invasive god-awful drivers, making my commute the weirdly perfect time for diving into the music-listening aspect of this project for the bonus of refocusing my road rage. And it’s a shift I’m glad preceded all five versions of “Going to California” accounting for the majority of one Friday-deadline-day dreary drive home that made me appreciate all over again how thoroughly novel it is hearing the same song five ways, especially after preemptively bracing for something a little more monotonous.

And there were treats like that strewn all through the Gs. Like the three Mae “Good (M)orning / (A)fternoon / (E)vening” songs getting their reunion after existing on separate albums for so long. And Eels’ “Going to your Funeral” parts I and II finally coming consecutively, and not too long after a smattering of “God” songs was far more enjoyable than I first thought they’d be, and not just because that 16-song run ended with the one-two punch of Tom Waits’ growling “God’s Away on Business” and then Eels coming in again to have an apt final word on the matter with “God’s Silence.” Entries from The Wall got that reshuffled-for-titular-proximity treatment, too, with “Goodbye Blue Sky” and “Goodbye Cruel World” sidling right up to each other, which wasn’t even Pink Floyd’s best quirk of alphabetical organization—that’s an honor reserved their locational-gold mashup with with The Black Keys.

It’s probably worth noting that the aforementioned Eels appearances weren’t the most significant impact that band had during the duration of this letter. I’ve got a slowly gestating ode to Electro-Shock Blues cooking over how I did cling to that album like a life raft in the aftermath of my mother-in-law’s death so I’ll save the majority of those ramblings for whenever that comes together, but even that experience underscored something that came into stark clarity throughout the G songs: No matter how much who I am changes, what life circumstances I bring to a old favorite for the first time, or why I’m getting lost in the music my heart knows like a well-worn map, there is so much comfort—and joy!—in the songs that move through life with you and are always primed and ready to keep you company when you don’t know what you need but you know damn well it isn’t a head or a house full or roaring silence. Of all the lessons I learned over the course of the G letters, the best by far was the reassurance that those little sparks of light in music worth rediscovering and revisiting always make navigating the blackout conditions of suffocating grief so much easier to bear.

G Songs
Total: 464 songs
First song “Gainesville, Fla.” by John Vanderslice
Last song: “Gypsy Moth” by Andrew Bird
Shortest song: “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party (Exit)” by Pink Floyd (39 seconds)
Longest song: “Goodbye Sky Harbor” by Jimmy Eat World (16:14 minutes)
Most recurring song: “Going to California” by Led Zeppelin, also covered by Cool Summer and The Valiant Arms (five versions)
Most time spent on one song: “Grey Street” by Dave Matthews and DMB (20.7 minutes) (it’s worth pointing out that the cumulative run time of those four versions beat “Going to California” by 0.3 minutes)
Number of songs not on Spotify: 22
Total playing time (letter): 1.2 days
Total playing time (cumulative): 11.5 days