Ponytail Picks #62 - Spring
We’re just two buds poking our heads up through the dirt with a springtime offering, free for the pickin’.
LISTEN
Chill spring
I’ve become a real lo-fi girl over the last 5+ years, filling up my digital music library with as many chill beats “to relax/study to” as I can get my hands on. One of my go-to sources is Netherlands’ Chillhop Music, who started putting out quarterly “Chillhop Essentials” compilation albums of “chilled hiphop, jazzhop, and triphop” thematically centered on each of the four seasons back in 2016. I was instantly hooked, but it was only recently that I put together seasonal chillhop playlists of my own where I threw all the Essentials albums of a certain season together, along with other season-related beats (Ponytail Pal
’s “Spring” is a wonderful example of one for our current season), ready for a satisfying shuffle play during work or at home.The last couple years of Chillhop Music’s Essentials albums have also featured some incredibly well-done visuals to pair with the music, from cozy wallpapers to adorable looping animations, and my wife, my daughter, and I are all pretty obsessed with all the cute little details they include in each seasonal oasis-scape. They just put out their latest one for Spring 2025 and it does not disappoint.
Here’s to new life rising!
-JB
Thanks for chilling with us. Say hi in the comments!
WATCH
Movie characters with a spring in their step
Chad in Burn After Reading (2008)
The Grinch in The Grinch (2018)
Tigger in The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977)
Slinky Dog in Toy Story (1995)
Turnip Head in Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)
Here’s to hopping to it (feel free to insert your own personal goal for spring here) with the tenacity of a tigger and the tenderness of a turnip.
-JB
READ
The anticipation of spring in End of the World
Spring hasn’t quite landed in Medicine Hat. The majority-colour of the grass is still a sandy beige, the sky still grey, the temperature flirting with 0°C. If you haven’t lived in a place with real winters, you can’t fully understand how strongly we anticipate everything turning green again.
Haruki Murakami takes full advantage of this feeling to help drive the apocalyptically titled half of his 1985 dueling-narrative novel, End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland. It’s an odd book, and the main engine prompting you to turn the page is your need to know how the two plots will intersect. But the End of the World chapters ground themselves in nature, and more specifically, our desire for the ease that arrives with the end of cold weather.
The protagonist’s desperate need for spring adds an extra layer to a shared thread pushing the two stories forward: limitations placed on us—externally or internally—and our constant need to test them.
-AK
(PS: If you actually take me up on this suggestion, here’s a playlist of the music mentioned in the book.)
Spring’s sprung and the maple leaves are on their way. Tune in next time to see what sort of sweet and/or sticky things we’ve got to say about our homeland of