It's Tuesday. Slow day. The kind of afternoon where I reorganize the experimental hip hop section for the third time this month because nobody's come in since eleven and I need to convince myself I'm accomplishing something. I find the TOBACCO records—both of them—filed under T when they should obviously be cross-referenced with Black Moth Super Rainbow under B, because if you don't know Tom Fec is the guy behind both projects, what are we even doing here.
That's when I remember this playlist. Someone left it on my counter scribbled on a receipt: "San Antonio vacation mix." Not workout music. Not BPM-optimized tempo zones. Vacation music that happens to work for running. Which is basically admitting that the best running playlists are never about running at all.
San Antonio. End of 2022. I've never been, but I know exactly what this is. It's Ra Ra Riot's "Boy" opening with that orchestral sweep—baroque pop that sounds like it costs more to record than most indie bands make in a year. It's TV On The Radio's "Mercy" building into something that feels like walking around a city you don't live in, where nobody knows your name and you can pretend you're someone who makes better decisions. Future Starts Slow by The Kills drops the tempo but raises the stakes—Alison Mosshart's voice like gravel wrapped in leather, VV's guitar doing that garage-minimal thing they perfected on Blood Pressures.
Then TOBACCO shows up. "Fresh Hex." If you know Black Moth Super Rainbow—the psychedelic outfit from western Pennsylvania that sounds like Boards of Canada if they grew up in a dying steel town instead of the Scottish Highlands—then you know Tom Fec's solo work is where he lets the beats get uglier and the synths get cheaper in the best possible way. This isn't running music. This is what vacation feels like when you're somewhere unfamiliar and the heat makes everything shimmer a little.
The thing about genre crossovers nobody talks about: they only work when there's a unifying mood underneath. This playlist shouldn't work. Baroque pop, experimental hip hop, garage rock, neo-psychedelic, space rock—that's five different sections of the store, five different customers who would never speak to each other. But listen to how Phantogram's "Don't Move" sits next to Ghostland Observatory's "Sad Sad City." Both are built on the same foundation: electronic beats that refuse to sound like EDM, vocals that feel human even when they're processed to hell. That's the Austin connection—Ghostland Observatory came out of that scene where rock bands started using synths without apologizing for it.
The Joy Formidable appears three times. "A Heavy Abacus," "Whirring." That's not an accident. That's someone who wore out The Big Roar the same way I did. Welsh band, recorded in North London, mixed in Connecticut, sounds bigger than geography allows. Ritzy Bryan's guitar tone on "Whirring" is what I imagine vacation feels like when you're running somewhere that isn't home—too loud, slightly overwhelming, beautiful in a way that makes you forget you're supposed to be pacing yourself.
By the time "Hawker Boat" hits—TOBACCO again, deeper into the trip, deeper into whatever this playlist is trying to remember—I'm not thinking about San Antonio anymore. I'm thinking about what it means to make a playlist that captures "the vibe I was feeling." Not what happened. Not what you saw. The vibe. The mood underneath the itinerary. That's what running playlists are supposed to do, right? Capture the thing you can't explain to someone who wasn't there.
Discovery's "Osaka Loop Line" is Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot's Wes Miles—which means this playlist opens and closes the same circle. If you didn't know that, you'd miss it. If you do know it, you realize someone built this the way I build compilations: obsessively, connecting dots nobody asked you to connect, making it mean something even if the meaning only exists in your head.
The playlist ends with "The Dark Forest Joggers" by Black Moth Super Rainbow. TOBACCO's band. The loop closes. The vacation ends. You're back on your regular route, running your regular miles, but for fifty-three minutes you were somewhere else. That's the con we pull on ourselves every time we lace up. We think the music is just the soundtrack. Really, it's the whole reason we're out here. Because what came first, the running or the excuse to listen to TOBACCO at a volume that makes the synths feel like architecture? Don't answer that.
