Two years into Cornell, I’ve made the devastating trip from Kuwait all the way to New York many times already — approximately 70 hours of suspended time stressing about course registration and wondering if I forgot to turn my room’s lights off. The best remedy for high altitude anxiety is a bit of art.
The songs I’ve selected represent a wild range of my thoughts as I count down the hours to touchdown at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Call it a window into my subconscious, or just a soundtrack to the turbulent, ever-shifting moods of a long-haul journey.
1. Slum Village, John Legend, Kanye West: “Selfish”
Effortlessly smooth, this track has me brooding over problems I couldn’t fathom having. The song has a certain vulnerability behind it, capturing the tension of desiring someone deeply while recognizing that “love” can become possessive and self-serving. Each verse is dreamier than the last. A warm dusty sample, coupled with spacious layering, charges the track with nostalgia for people I never knew; quite sad, as I fly over places I may never visit.
2. Daft Punk: “Face to Face”
“Face to Face” is a sampling masterclass — a sonic mosaic of over 70 20th century micro-samples cut and layered into the track. It is a hyper-kinetic amalgamation of old, forgotten sounds. This is music that is more than pastiche; it is an ode to the disparate and the lost, those you may forget and the parts of you that you refuse to confront.
3. Toro y Moi: “Last Year”
This is nostalgia rendered in soft focus, a track trying to remember a location without quite being able to place it. A song for remembering something that may only have been better simply because it is gone. The production is hazy and gentle, featuring a laid-back mix of organic warmth and breezy pop sensibilities.
4. Marvin Gaye: “What’s Happening Brother”
This is a beautiful, jazzy track that captures the raw ache of trying to reconnect after being away for too long. It manages to turn the confusing feeling of a changing world into a late-night conversation with a friend. Flying back and forth across the world for college, I feel a bit restless — this constant displacement makes me worry that by living in two wildly different worlds, I might lose my grip on both. But hey, nobody remedies melancholic solitude better than Marvin Gaye.
5. Nujabes, Cise Starr: “Lady Brown”
“Lady Brown” is one of those songs that accompanies your thoughts rather than taking them over. It leaves just enough space for memory, movement and imagination to coexist with its mellow rhythm. Like sunlight caught between windows, this is a track that suspends time in a warm, dust-mote blur. Effortlessly weightless.
6. Soul II Soul: “Time Untitled”
“Time Untitled” feels like someone threw a bunch of genres into a London basement and somehow got it all to work. Soul, dub, funk, house — the track keeps shifting its weight without ever neatly settling into one of them. It is as loose as one would want to be on a long-haul flight.
7. Air: “La femme d’argent”
A hypnotic, retro-futuristic soundtrack to an imaginary ’70s movie. The lush keyboard arrangements swell and dissipate luxuriously without being too flashy, perfect for staring out a plane window at nothing in particular. Agelessly sleek.
8. Dean Blunt: “100”
“100” has the feeling of overhearing something through a wall. Dean Blunt’s production is almost anti-lush; distortion, silence and weird tonal gaps are a part of the music. It is emotionally intimate precisely because it refuses to explain itself, a fragment of a memory you can only partially remember.
9. Samba Jean Baptiste: “January Sweetheart”
This track feels just like the chilly sunlight I’ve gotten used to in Ithaca: fleeting, but warmer than it has any right to be. I love when instrumentation feels gently layered, almost tactile. Everything about this song is comfortable, sitting right in its groovy plane. It is sweet, but not truly happy, a peculiar ache of wistfulness.
10. Ojerime: “Give It Up 2 Me”
Some songs move with confidence. Ojerime’s voice is low and intimate in the nocturnal mix of this track, letting the rhythm thrive. It is the sound of wanting without overthinking the consequences — less melancholic, but still carrying a sense of emotional unreality.
You can find the playlist here.
‘Solar Flare’ is a weekly playlist column where Sun contributors spotlight a slice of musical taste with the campus community. It runs every Monday.
Ali AlSaif is a member of the Class of 2029 in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a staff writer for the Arts & Culture department and can be reached at aea252@cornell.edu.
