Tuning out
Don't bother me – can't you see I'm trying to make a playlist?

On the rare occasions I speak with people, they like to ask how I’ve been. “Busy,” I say. “But like, actually busy. Not just pretending to be busy to get me out of social engagements and other unwanted obligations. Busy, like, all-the-time busy. Busy like I-now-understand-how-coffee-becomes-a-person’s-identity levels of busy. BUSY. Now, please excuse me while I get back to the business of busyness.”

Sometimes these people don’t believe that I’m actually busy. This usually applies when these people are not themselves small business owners or entrepreneurs. I think people who run their own businesses generally understand this sense of being busy all the time. 

We are so busy because, despite what your parents might think, a small business is not like a small child – you can’t just give it some whiskey to knock it out and then shut off the baby monitor for the night. A business never lets you rest. At least it never lets ME rest.

However. Running a small business – very small, because it consists of myself and the ideas dashing through my brain, some of which I deem less unfit for printing in the paper – doesn’t explain all of my busyness lately. No, in lieu of doing work-work, I’ve been working on a playlist.

Sure, you might say this project is “only” a one-hour playlist. You might think that with 100,000 new tracks added to Spotify each day, identifying 15 or 20 of them to fill an hour of airtime shouldn’t be so hard. You might also think that, because I am not getting paid for this playlist, that the stakes are nonexistent.

You, however, might be wrong.

The hopes of a nation rest on this playlist. Or at least the hopes of a few people who belong to some nation or other. Maybe 10 of us. Odds are, at least one belongs to Bronco Nation, if that’s what you call Denver football fans, or Ford SUV drivers, or members of the Nagurski fan club. 

But for those 10 or so people of various nationalities, the stakes could hardly be pounded further into the ground if I hit my head against them instead of against this cinder-block wall.

See, I was asked to throw together a little music for a post-workshop dance practice coming up. Wide open, free and easy, no pressure – people may not even dance to the music I play, unless they’re not quite tired out yet, in which case they’ll dance Every Song, and oh, also they’re learning a sub-style of Argentine tango entirely new to them, so this playlist will basically be their first-ever impression of it, so if they don’t vibe with the playlist they could decide they hate this particular dance style FOREVER, and it all came down to my poor choice of a Fine Young Cannibals song.

Just a one-hour playlist. You might as well tell Chopin that he plays just the piano, or Maggie Smith that despite a long and accomplished career in theater and on screen that she will just be remembered as the Harry Potter lady.

Then you might as well take those examples and quadruple them in insult and intensity and importance, and that’ll give you a sense of the great impact of this playlist on my life and the lives of these dozen or fewer people taking part in the niche practice of dancing Argentine tango as a waltz, only they spell it “vals,” because language is fun. 

However you spell it, it’s still tango music in 3/4 time instead of the usual 4/4 time, unless it’s actually 6/8 time, which seems like the same fraction to me but I’ve heard musicians argue about the distinctions longer and more passionately than “Star Wars” fans debating if Han or Greedo shot first. This also means that the vast majority of music, both tango and popular, is not accessible to me in building this Perfect Playlist. According to my latest survey, in fact, of those 100,000 new songs added to Spotify each day, fewer than 1% are waltzes (and even fewer still are “valses”).

And that’ll help you maybe grasp a strand of a hint of a sense of why I’m so darn busy.

Oh, and add in that I’m driving to another town both to debut and to close this playlist. Which means that if it goes badly, my name will be smeared, tattered, tarred and feathered in an entirely NEW community, in addition to my already declining reputation among those whom I shut down for asking me how I’m doing at the beginning of this piece. 

This playlist MATTERS. So, please excuse me. I have to return to it before my regular small business realizes what I’ve actually been doing for several weeks now.

– Zach Hively