Happy holigays! Last year around this time I made a rec list of Christmas movies, so I figured this year it’s time for music. Especially since so many great songs came out recently!

The whole mix that I’m putting at the end of this post is almost 50 songs long. Which means I didn’t put them all on the post itself, but instead focused on my absolute favourites of 2020 alone.

I didn’t want to simply put the soundtrack of Happiest Season on my mix and call it a day (yes, it’s all by LGBT artists!), so I looked far and wide for more songs for you guys! My other goal was to make this mix as full of original songs as possible, and I mostly succeeded there.

In any case, believe me, you do want to check out the mix too, for even more holiday gay cheer!

Not to get ahead of myself, but this is probably the best mix I have ever made. Not just because I used only great songs which also work together very well, but most of all because of theme of those songs.

I used one of the Twenty-One Love Poems by Adrienne Rich (from the collection “Dream of a Common Language”) as the original description of it & it should tell you better than I ever could, what the theme here is.

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,
you’ve been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:
our friend the poet comes into my room
where I’ve been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake. You’ve kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . .
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.

I think you will all agree that having someone love you makes you feel like you’re home, safe & sound. And gay love somehow makes that feeling more pronounced. And so here we are! Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

Some time ago I said on twitter that I want to make a music rec list & asked what vibe should I go for. Hannah Abigail Clarke gave me “songs at the midsection of 🌈 and ☠️🦷🦇”. (And by the way, if you still haven’t, you should totally preorder Hannah’s book, The Scapegracers. Teen gay witches!)

I’m not going to lie. I was pretty liberal with that theme, and so my choices might not be the most obvious. All of them are by LGBT artists, of course, so all of them cover the rainbow part, really. But I treated the death and scary, monster-ish part in a few different ways.

So there are songs that talk about dying & suffering (Die Alone, Martyr) of people, but also places (Tayf (Ghost). There are songs celebrating life (BL, Gaia). There are songs which vibes made me think of a dark night. And more! Hopefully my choices are self-explanatory, but please don’t ask me to give my reasoning in actual words.

(The title of the mix comes from Tayf (Ghost) by Mashrou’ Leila.)