The Sunday Digest 068
Ain't no place I'd rather be.
Welcome to The Sunday Digest — a free Sunday newsletter featuring long (and some short) reads, original columns, things I’ve saved over the last week, relaxing playlists, episodes releases, exclusive product drops, and more. Yes, you can reply to this email. I’d love to hear from you. Or, if podcasts are more your speed on Sundays, we’ve got that too.
Sunday Read › How ‘Mr. Brightside’ Became a Generation’s Anthem
by Jessica M. Goldstein for The New York Times
I was the kid in high school who maybe liked The Killers a little too much. You always knew I liked a band when I’d Photoshop a graphic of them for our at-home desktop, and they replaced Oasis like it was nothing.
I’ve enjoyed “Mr. Brightside” in all its forms. The original. Buzzed on pints at the pub. The Jacques Lu Cont remix. Ripping around in my 1995 Subaru Legacy. It was a song we latched onto for various reasons, but also a song that never loses its weight.
This week’s Sunday Read pays tribute to just that. While I intended to use this in last week’s edition (sorry, explanation below!), it was simply too good to pass up this week. Here’s an excerpt:
CHANCES ARE YOU’VE heard “Mr. Brightside” at a wedding — maybe you played it at your wedding. According to DJ Intelligence, one of the top software platforms D.J.s use to let their clients build event playlists, “Mr. Brightside” is the third most-requested song, behind only Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” and Abba’s “Dancing Queen.”
Evan Reitmeyer, owner of the D.C.-area D.J. company MyDeejay, said “Mr. Brightside” is on more than half the playlists of his upcoming weddings — and its numbers have only been growing: “I would say in the last five to seven years especially, it’s just become a perennial hit that’s getting requested at every wedding.”
Despite its not-very-matrimonial theme, “Nobody seems to care about the lyrics,” he said. “They just care about how it feels. And I don’t mind; it kills on the dance floor so I’m going to keep playing it.”
Read in full here.
New Episode › Retail Therapy 059: The In/Out End-of-the-Year Episode
Now that all of 2023's vibes have finally shifted, we can make our final determinations of the year about what's IN and what's OUT. Showering at the luxury gym, ankle cleavage, Portait Mode, Saltburn, zippered shirts, Ralph Lauren, and more — we always seem to cover more in these episodes than any others. Enjoy!
Listen to Retail Therapy on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube (see above), and anywhere else podcasts are found.
The Sunday Haiku: January, stay away.
This time of the year,
every day feels like Sunday,
and that’s fine with me.
From The Camera Roll
In my ongoing 2023 quest to make my life far more analog than it has been over the last decade, I’ve decided to be the guy who totes his camera along everywhere (read: politely asks his wife to put it in her bag) in an effort to express some creativity outside of my phone.
So far, I’ve really only shared a few photos on Instagram even though I’ve been developing far more film than it seems. It doesn’t hurt that there’s a record store next to the lab but that’s neither here nor there.
This past weekend, I missed The Sunday Digest because I was in Tennessee at Blackberry Mountain enjoying a wellness weekend with my wife, Sally. While the (extremely fun) mixology class attempted to derail our wellness plans, we ended up having a great weekend of relaxation and Folklore vibes. And while you may have already seen these photos elsewhere, just consider this my personal journal entry for the week that I may go back to in the future.
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so good. what camera are you using?