Welcome! This pinned post is where you can find links to my COVID-19 playlists.
Read on to learn about the playlist initiative and what you’ll find in each list, or boldly click on one of these quick links to start listening.
Sacred #SongsOfComfort: YouTube | Sacred #SongsOfComfort: Spotify | Secular #SongsOfComfort: YouTube
#SongsOfComfort: What and Why
We all need some comfort these days. Last month, I was inspired by @YoYo_Ma to participate in #SongsOfComfort. Starting 3/21/2020, I began selecting a song on YouTube each day to publicly post to my Facebook account, and then I added that same song to a Spotify playlist.
Sometimes we humans start projects like this, and then quickly let them fizzle out. But not this time–it’s been a month now, and I’ve got two different #SongsOfComfort playlists with well over two hours of music between them. It helps me, and friends have told me it helps them.
If you’re looking for a lift, here’s now to access everything! I plan to keep going as long as it takes until my physical distancing is over.
At first I focused on music from the world’s religious traditions, since so many people are comforted by religious music. To date I’ve included music from Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Rastafarianism. It all started here:
Public post. As many of my friends know, I’m not religious but I like religious music. Whether you are personally…
Posted by Alys Lindholm on Saturday, March 21, 2020
Since then, every day, at least once a day, I post another song video to Facebook, with a few personal notes and the hashtag #SongsOfComfort.
But nobody wants to dig through a million Facebook posts looking for something, so I also started a Spotify playlist. As soon as I post the day’s YouTube performance to Facebook, I choose the Spotify performance and add it to this list. The performances selected sometimes differ from the YouTube performances, but the arrangements are always similar when possible.
Eventually I got really wise, and created a playlist of all those YouTube videos themselves. One thing to know about YouTube is that if the content is marked as created for children, it cannot be added to a playlist. That’s how a couple of things like “Panis Angelicus” went missing from this list.
But wait! There was still a problem… While I can enjoy most religious music without being a member of the religion, that’s not true of everyone. And there are so many fantastic secular songs out there.
For my fam who are allergic to the religion thing, I gotchu. Here’s Tori telling us each to be the Jesus we need. 😘 #Secular #SongsofComfort
Posted by Alys Lindholm on Sunday, March 29, 2020
That idea kept lurking in the back of my mind. A few days ago, I formally started my secular #SongsOfComfort ritual. They are now posted once a day on Facebook, too, with personal notes and the hashtags #Secular #SongsOfComfort. You can see all of them at the secular YouTube playlist, updated daily.
Unfortunately there’s no secular Spotify list, because so many of the things I’d want on that list are just not available on Spotify.
Listen Now
Sacred #SongsOfComfort
Secular #SongsOfComfort