“Our lives are shaped by what we love.” That is the name of the Odyssey track that opens this month’s curation, and it is one of those one-liners that has been passed around for so long that its origins have blurred. I came upon the song the way I arrive at most things that turn out to matter (to me), by accident, while watching an episode of The White Lotus - half-listened-to, the title alone enough to make me stop what I was doing. It is not often that we are handed a thesis statement in the form of a song name, so when we are, the right thing to do is to use it.
May, for us at Tibi, is going to be a month of motion. Cars and planes and the kind of late nights that fold quietly into the next morning without a clear seam between them. A playlist made for a month like this carries the texture of the times - songs picked between flights, in the back of a car at one in the morning, on a walk that was supposed to be twenty minutes and turned into ninety. Curation, when it is honest, is less a matter of selection than it is of listening - to where you have been, who you have been with, and what has been quietly playing while the rest of life happened. You do not build a playlist. You collect one. The shape of what you love does the rest.
Dirt, by Sid Simons, is the song I have been carrying for a while. Sid is a Tibi Close Friend (releasing 5.05.2026), and naturally a personal friend. He is one of those artists whose work does not posture - there is no performance of seriousness, no signaling, just the quiet evidence of someone who has paid attention to his craft for long enough that the craft has started paying attention back. He wrote Dirt about a friend who passed away, and when he first composed it, the song was a heavy thing to carry. He has said, more recently, that it does not feel that way anymore. That it has turned, somewhere along the way, into something closer to gratitude. I think about that often - how a song written from the deepest part of grief can, with enough time and enough living, become a way of keeping someone close rather than a way of mourning them. There is a seasonal logic to it that feels especially right for May. Winter does not vanish. It thaws, and what was frozen becomes part of the ground again, and the ground grows things. There is a version of Dirt (snippet above) on the way that I am not yet able to talk about in full - a stripped-down piano cut, voice and keys and very little else, recorded in a way that finds whatever was always underneath the production. I have heard it once, in a single room, and have not stopped thinking about it since. More on that soon. For now, the original is on the playlist, and I would suggest paying attention.
If Sid’s Dirt is the song I have been carrying, then Ronnie Lane’s Roll On Babe is the song that has been carrying me. Ronnie Lane is a patron saint of a specific kind of leaving - the kind that is not aggrieved or nostalgic, that does not need to make a scene of itself, that is simply the sound of someone making peace with the next thing while the previous is still in view. There is a gentleness in his voice that does not soften the truth of the song, which is that we are always, in some quiet way, on our way somewhere else. In a month built around movement, I cannot think of a better companion. I have been listening to it in cars, at the ends of nights, on the way to whatever May is becoming.
And finally, Whiskey Woman, by Flamin’ Groovies, which closes the playlist on purpose. The Flamin’ Groovies are one of those bands you discover late and feel slightly cheated by - like there has been a whole shelf of records you should have been listening to for years and nobody bothered to tell you. Whiskey Woman is the kind of song that does not announce itself. It just rolls in, takes the room, and leaves before anyone has the presence of mind to ask its name. Good for driving. Better for the very specific hour after the dinner has ended and before the night has decided what it wants to be.
A couple of honorable mentions on the way out. Bon Iver’s live take of HEY, MA from Pitchfork 2023 has a looseness that the studio version does not, and the looseness is the point - there is something about a live-recording that lets you hear the room. And, Agalisiga’s Tsitsutsa Tsigesv, sung in Cherokee, is one of those songs that does not need to be understood to be felt, a reminder that meaning is not always a matter of vocabulary.
Put it on in the back of a car at one in the morning. Or in a kitchen on a Saturday. Or on a walk you meant to be twenty minutes but turned into something greater. And let the things you love do the rest.