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Daydreamin’ Vol. 1

Forty-four tracks assembled for the specific pleasure of staring out of a window. Slow, spacious, and completely indifferent to genre.

A mix built on one quality

What holds this together is not style but weightlessness. Everything here is arranged with air in it: piano and voice, acoustic guitar, the occasional string section, and almost no percussion doing anything assertive. Coldplay sits next to Prince sits next to a Czech pianist, and the transitions are seamless because the criterion is atmosphere rather than category.

It is also, quietly, a covers playlist. A remarkable number of these are reinterpretations, and hearing familiar songs slowed down and stripped back is a large part of the effect.

What to listen for

k.d. lang's "Hallelujah" is the definitive version of the Leonard Cohen song for many people — Cohen himself said as much — and it is worth hearing next to the hundreds of lesser ones.

Michael Bublé's "God Only Knows" and Robyn Sherwell's "Landslide" take on two untouchable songs and get somewhere by underplaying them. Sia's piano version of her own "Elastic Heart" is more affecting than the original.

"What The World Needs Now Is Love" appears twice — Will Young's and Andra Day's — which is a deliberate curatorial choice worth noticing. The Bacharach and David song has been recorded hundreds of times; putting two versions on one playlist invites you to compare.

Prince's "Venus De Milo" is the deep cut: an instrumental from Parade, and a reminder that he was a serious composer as well as everything else. Robert Glasper's "Cold" and Brian Culbertson's "Don't Go" handle the jazz end.

Laura Mvula's "Little Girl Blue" is the standout vocal — the Rodgers and Hart standard by way of Nina Simone, sung by one of the most harmonically adventurous British artists of her generation.

Neil Young's "Philadelphia" and Patrick Watson's "The Great Escape" are the most emotionally direct things here.

Go deeper

Three artists worth following out of this. Laura Mvula — Sing to the Moon is a genuinely original album, orchestrated by a classically trained composer who happens to write pop songs. Patrick Watson — the Montreal songwriter whose catalogue is full of this. Fink — a British artist who moved from electronic music to spare acoustic songwriting and is barely known outside a devoted audience.

For the tradition of the transformative cover: Johnny Cash's American Recordings, Nina Simone's entire approach to interpretation, and Cat Power's The Covers Record. The skill is in finding a different song inside the one everybody knows.

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