Melancholy Mixtape / June 2025

Seven moments of music outside the classical realm that channel wonder and desire in our flawed yet beautiful world.

Welcome to the latest Melancholy Mixtape, a Shades of Blue series that weaves together moments of melancholy classical music to help you cultivate calm, connection, and healing throughout the month. (If you're a new subscriber, head over here to check out previous installments.)

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911–1992). Sunbaker, dated 1937, printed c. 1975. Silver gelatin print. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Given that I write exclusively about classical music here at Shades of Blue, you may find it surprising that my first musical obsession as a child wasn't Ludwig van Beethoven. It was Eddie Van Halen.

In fact, my parents' favorite story to recite about my youngest days is how I rendered my copy of Van Halen's Women and Children First completely unplayable. Apparently every time I wanted to find my favorite songs, I would drag the pumpkin-colored tonearm of my Fisher-Price record player across the vinyl, the poor stylus forced to graffiti the album surface with scratches.

But as I grew up, I gravitated away from the extroverted, testosterone-fueled music that blared from the speakers in my family's living room, where, alongside Van Halen, bands like Black Sabbath, Dio, and Foreigner reigned supreme. My new infatuation was with the albums of classical music my maternal grandmother regularly gifted me from the Musical Heritage Society. Soon I had amassed a record collection of my own, replacing Eddie Van Halen's wild mane of chestnut hair with the powdered wigs of Mozart and Bach.

Now, at 46 years old, I turn to classical and non-classical recordings alike for nourishing doses of melancholy music — those rivers of sound that mirror the feelings of love and loss, hope and longing that wind through my veins. In the personal canon I've formed over the decades, Maurice Ravel is equal to Radiohead, and Gustav Mahler's sprawling symphonies elicit the same tears of astonishment as a Björk album.

So for this month's Melancholy Mixtape, I'm offering you a different look at my musical DNA: seven moments of music outside the classical realm that help me channel comfort, wonder, and desire in our flawed yet beautiful world. Regardless of how you consume this renegade entry in our Melancholy Mixtape series — getting to know each work one by one here on Substack, or returning to them regularly on YouTube or Spotify — I hope you enjoy this month's selections.

Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man / Mysteries

Oh mysteries of love, where war is no more
I'll be there anytime

Longtime Shades of Blue readers already know of my enduring love for Beth Gibbons, singer of the British band Portishead. After releasing two of the seminal trip-hop albums of the '90s, Beth switched gears with her solo outing Out of Season, where she traded Portishead's record-scratch rhythms and operatic tales of isolation for gently plucked guitars and visions of elysian fields.

"God knows how I adore life," Gibbon's fragile voice intones in the album's opening track, "Mysteries," an expression of gratitude for life in all its messiness and complexity. "When the wind turns on the shores lies another day / I cannot ask for more."

Björk / Jóga

All that no one sees
You see what's inside of me
Every nerve that hurts
You heal deep inside of me

Björk never fails to enchant me, whether she's stomping across the stage with a brass band, singing tender lullabies accompanied by a harpsichord, or discussing music and modernism with the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Her 1997 album, Homogenic, remains my favorite entry in her four-decade discography — a fusion of sensuous strings and volcanic beats that finds its emotional core in "Jóga," Björk's love letter to her friend Jóhanna.

Lana Del Rey / Freak

Flames so hot that they turn blue
Palms reflecting in your eyes
Like an endless summer

From my first experience of "Summertime Sadness" more than a decade ago, I've been only too happy to inhabit Lana Del Rey's world of nostalgia and white-hot desire, set in the urban wilds of Southern California. In "Freak," from her 2015 album Honeymoon, Del Rey beckons her latest lover to join her on the West Coast, where "we could slow dance to rock music / kiss while we do it / talk 'til we both turn blue." The fact that Del Rey merges "Freak" with Claude Debussy's Clair de lune in the song's music video only elevates my love for her.

Patrick Wolf / Teignmouth

From my window
I saw two birds lost at sea
I caught our reflection
In that silent tragedy

To hear Patrick Wolf's music is to travel across time to the age of troubadours singing their songs of sorrow outside ivy-strewn castle walls. A classically trained multi-instrumentalist, Wolf moves among violin, viola, keyboards, and Celtic harp as he spins his poetic tales of love, grief, and adventure. In "Teignmouth," we follow Wolf as he searches for refuge from city life along England's southern coast, propelled by a "constant yearning / for great love and learning / for the wind to carry me free."

Jeff Buckley / Lilac Wine

I made wine from the lilac tree
Put my heart in its recipe
It makes me see what I want to see
And be what I want to be

Jeff Buckley often wove a tapestry of musical influences into his live sets, performing his own songs alongside centuries-spanning selections like the closing aria from Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas and a mesmerizing take on Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." But it's his cover of "Lilac Wine," made famous in 1966 by Nina Simone, that I hold closest to my heart. "I lost myself on a cool, damp night / I gave myself in that misty light," Buckley quivers in his honey-coated tenor, "was hypnotized by a strange delight / under a lilac tree."

Sigur Rós / Salka

I've experienced Sigur Rós live five times, and each concert has left me in awe of the Icelandic band's power to hold thousands of people in rapt silence for hours. The individual elements of their sound — singer Jón Þór Birgisson's choir-boy falsetto, his patented scraping of a cello bow across the strings of an amplified guitar, and lyrics delivered in a made-up language christened Hopelandic — may feel alien at first, but you'll soon be swept away as "Salka" builds to a climax of orchestral ecstasy.

Radiohead / Street Spirit (Fade Out)

Be a world child, form a circle
Before we all go under

The members of Radiohead have proved themselves prophets who foresaw society's devolution into tech-fueled isolation in their anthemic '90s albums The Bends and OK Computer. "This machine will not communicate / these thoughts and the strain I am under," Thom Yorke broods in "Street Spirit (Fade Out)," as he unfurls a warning of impending apocalypse.

But as it brings down the curtain on The Bends — an anxiety-laced album in which iron lungs and plastic houseplants dissolve our humanity and connection to nature — "Street Spirit" leaves us with a ray of hope, a potent prescription to combat our modern disquiet: "Immerse your soul in love."

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Want to share your experience with one of the songs in this month's mixtape? I'd love to hear about it! Leave a comment below or reply to this email. (And if you enjoyed your time here today, would you ever so kindly tap that little heart below? 👇🏼)

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