WK: Later Covi #521

Seventy-eight tracks of pandemic-year-two Friday-night listening. May 2021. Most of the friend group was still working from home, the calendar was still mostly empty, and the Weekend Kickoff had quietly turned into the closest thing any of us had to a standing event. By this point the rotation had been running through pandemic-adjusted listening for fifteen months and the songs that survived into the May edition were the ones that had actually held up across the long quiet stretch.

Foo Fighters anchor the rock side. The band kept dropping singles through the pandemic in a way that didn’t get the credit it deserved — they were one of the few legacy acts that just kept working when most of the touring catalog had gone dormant. Maroon 5 carries the pop-radio crossover for the friends in the group chat who wanted the radio singles in their rotation without having to admit it.

FKJ with Tom Misch “Losing My Way” opens because that’s the song that defined what the second pandemic year sounded like in my kitchen. French producer FKJ has the kind of catalog that floats between jazz and electronic in a way that doesn’t really resolve into either, and the Tom Misch collaboration is the cut where both artists are at their most restrained. The track is six minutes long and it earns every second.

Justin Bieber with Daniel Caesar and GIVĒON “Peaches” sits early in the rotation because the song was unavoidable for the entire spring. The original version is what’s on the playlist; the late-rotation remix with Snoop Dogg and Usher and Ludacris is on a different tape entirely. Future with Drake “Life Is Good” is the rap-radio counterpoint — a song that came out late 2019 and that the pandemic-rotation kept playing well into 2021 because there was nothing competing for the slot.

BENEE with Gus Dapperton “Supalonely” is the song that won the early pandemic and that one of the friends in the group chat refused to stop playing through the second year as well. Streaming-era bedroom-pop. The vocal is half-spoken, the chorus is built around a single repeated phrase, and the song became inescapable on TikTok during the lockdown stretch and stayed inescapable on regular radio long after. Ariana Grande with Social House “boyfriend” sits mid-rotation — a 2019 single that the pandemic kept in the rotation through 2021 because the friend group’s collective listening had slowed down enough that catalog tracks could persist for years instead of months.

DaBaby with Roddy Ricch “ROCKSTAR” was the rap-radio peak of the year. The song earned its rotation duty by being short, sharp, and hook-driven — three qualities that pandemic-era listening rewarded. Normani “Motivation” is the slick-R&B-radio cut that I kept thinking would crossover into a bigger moment and that didn’t quite make it. The song deserved more than it got.

Masked Wolf “Astronaut In The Ocean” was the wildcard of the year. An Australian rapper nobody in the friend group had heard of in January and who was on every radio station by April. The song’s structure is unusual — minor-key piano loop, no real chorus, half-spoken-half-rapped vocal — and the friend group’s reaction was split. Half of us couldn’t stop playing it, half of us couldn’t believe the other half couldn’t stop playing it. Same pattern as Marshmello “Alone” five years earlier.

Seventy-eight tracks lands at about five hours. The right length for a long-quiet pandemic Friday where the music has to be on from dinner-prep through the late-evening dishes and into the hour after when nobody quite wanted to admit the night was over. The rotation has fewer dance-floor peaks than the pre-pandemic editions and more singalong anchors, because the at-home context rewards the songs you can sing along to when there’s nobody else in the room except your phone. The ‘later’ in the title was the inside joke about how long the pandemic had gone on. The playlist was the answer to the same question every Friday: what does the second year of this sound like?

The second-year pandemic editions read differently in retrospect than they did in the moment. By May 2021 we’d been doing the at-home Kickoff tradition for fifteen months — long enough that the playlists had built up their own internal momentum. The ‘later’ in the title was the joke that wasn’t really a joke anymore. The rotation was the answer to the same question every Friday: what does another year of this sound like?