Playlist No. 4 - Creep(y): Halloween is Hear

Did you know that one of the earliest iterations of “trick-or-treating” was called “guising,” a tradition born of Celtic heritage - where it is widely accepted that Halloween (or Samhain as it was known starting nearly 2,000 years ago) originated - in which young people would dress up and go through town asking for food or money in exchange for performing a play, song, or reciting a piece of poetry? Those were the treats!

Or that jack-o-lanterns were historically carved from turnips, potatoes, and beets before the pumpkin (a fruit, by the way, native to the Americas) was found to provide a more suitable surface area for carving once the tradition made its way here?

Or that Halloween is the 2nd largest commercial holiday in the United States, behind only Christmas? Okay, that one probably isn’t a shocker, but this one is:

The mask adorned my Michael Myers in the original “Halloween” was actually a mask of William Shatner’s Star Trek character, Captain Kirk, purchased from a costume shop near the production set.

There are some more tidbits below should you be interested. For this, our 4th installment of Medley’s monthly playlist, we took inspiration from a particularly haunting cover version of an already haunting Radiohead song. There’s nothing specific to Halloween about it, except that it sets a mood of other-worldliness. It came on our Spotify channel at the office the other day and, well, a playlist was born.

As we’ve talked about before, taking an idea, a brief flash of inspiration, building it out, testing different variations or scenarios as to how it might play out, and then settling on a finely tuned (!) approach is an incredibly rewarding exercise. Even if it’s just putting together a playlist. That’s certainly not going to make any particular mark on the world, but it’s fun. It’s engaging. It gets you thinking and leads you down paths of discovery that you otherwise wouldn’t have traveled. We never would have learned about the legend of Stingy Jack, or listened to Hell’s Bells on purpose, or said, “how could we have forgotten about A Nightmare on My Street by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince?” Classic.

So if you’re heading out to, or perhaps hosting, a costume party, just hanging at home and handing out candy, or looking to take a walk through the darker, sometimes kitschier side of music, we thought you might appreciate a few hours of Samhain-inspired tunes, and a couple more interesting facts to chew on with your candy corn (originally called Chicken Feed, true story): https://www.businessinsider.com/13-facts-you-never-knew-about-halloween-2013-10.

Consider this our modern, digitized guising performance. No tricks. Just some sonic treats.