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The Best Study Music Playlist for Deep Thinkers
A 20-SONG SELECTION OF THE CHOICEST INSTRUMENTAL SONGS FOR READING, WRITING, AND BROODING
If you’re tired of hearing your own heavy breathing while you read, write, and think, you can tune in to the melancholy drone of society’s machines wafting through your window, or you can put on some music. But not just any music — you need songs that sprawl, that are small, that chill, that transport, that center. You need The Best Study Music Playlist for Deep Thinkers (click the link for the uninterrupted playlist, and continue reading for a piece-by-piece synopsis). This 20-track instrumental goldmine has been carefully curated by a full-time reader, writer, and brooder (that’s me!) to ensure that its segmented sonic ambience doesn’t intrude upon your deep thoughts, but instead intensifies your cerebral wanderings.
I suspect that as you listen, you’ll find your pen lifting, the pages read flowing and glowing, and the philosophies forged brilliant. In fact, I wrote my Poetic Line Breaks Guide blog post listening to this study music playlist, so you know the songs are fertilizer for insight. On that note, I have no technical music knowledge, so I approached this post as an ekphrastic-type exercise and a chance for synaesthetic dalliance.
1. Noble Oak – “Stare Into You”
What better way to start things off on the Notes of Oak Blog study music playlist than with the bright and oozy gallop of “Stare Into You” by Noble Oak? This song canters along to the warm twang of a guitar flowing on waves of breathy cooing that instantly evoke Fleetwood Mac harmonies. This tune will kickstart your contemplation with the exact right amount of energy: simply sit back and bask in the melody’s green, sparkling, positive, planetary vibe. Send me off deep into my thoughts, Noble Oak.
2. L’indécis – “Soulful”
From that upbeat tune, we move into the moodier, groovier, “Soulful.” This song draws me in with keyboard chords that sound familiar, but that I can’t quite place, and then ripples into lyrical guitar that narrates a moment where I was present, but that I can’t quite remember. This shades-of-bright-blue song uproots forgotten moments in unknown cities, between blurred seasons, at anonymous backyard parties, and so on, all coated in both mystery and specificity, those two qualities so key to deep thinking.
3. Tycho – “A Walk”
What a soft and lovely transition from the fade-out of “Soulful” into the plodding surges of Tycho’s “A Walk.” Any Best Study Music Playlist could easily just be an entire Tycho album, or two Tycho albums, or all their albums in succession — but we’ll start off slowly on “A Walk,” strolling towards a kaleidoscope of sound. Tycho’s music always has a sense of progression — of variation and movement as one would find on a real walk — rather than the repetition (read, redundancy) so prevalent in most radio hits. In this song I find not just ambience, but encouragement to mentally wander. Carried along by the keyboard’s crisp reverberations, always in unexpected directions that escalate and then reveal, listening to “A Walk” while literally walking is a sure-fire path to epiphany, embodied at 3:19 in the song.
4. Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio – “Move on Up (Live on KEXP)”
The sonic momentum freighting us deeper into thought, plot, and composition keeps on trucking in “Move on Up.” For just over 5 minutes, we get to eavesdrop live on an enthusiastic conversation between a guitar, drums, and a gorgeous-sounding organ as they compare notes on the finer points of life trajectories. All three instruments talk like the best of friends — fluidly, intimately, and without drowning each other out. In our listening-in to this trio, we just might learn the secret to happy hour cocktails, sunrise, existence, work, skyscrapers, happiness, and above all, life’s movement as sound. At the very least, this song will get your brain up and shaking its lobes down low.
5. Bonobo – “Kerala”
Things get real frenetic now, with Bonobo’s “Kerala,” which crashes into our ears with resounding acoustic harp strings, and a background drum, bass, and I-don’t-know-exactly-what-the-hell-each-instrument-is-but-it-sure-sounds-nice escalation into chants of “yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah” punctuated by tinnier and higher vocal samples of “someday” and “oh yeah.” These sentence-less voices free us into the increasing cacophony/harmony of the instruments, always watched over by the harp. The song (and especially the video) are an accurate metaphor for an OCD brain during a panic attack — but that’s actually good. This melody should act as a catalyst — if it doesn’t make you panic that you must create something before something else happens, nothing will.
6. Julian Lage – “Nocturne (Live in Los Angeles)”
After that stimulating immersion in frenzy, we get to slide gently into the lullaby of Julian Lage’s electric guitar live in “Nocturne,” with its throaty blue mountain mist feel. This is a tune for when the cows plod home through lavender grayness and shut-tight daisies, and we stand at our windows and wonder at the brightening moon. Lage’s guitar playing blew me away on first listen: the clear warmth of a twilight story told by strings. This is a gentle song, though still strong, a narrative of the call of the night and the comfort of the music that runs cobalt through it. At this moment in The Best Study Music Playlist, you should kick off your boots, sit back, and sip your whiskey sour as you ponder the hour.
7. Khruangbin – “Dern Kala”
While we might find Julian Lage playing guitar on a butte under Montana starlight, I imagine Khruangbin dipping and jamming beside a lava lamp in 1960’s Thailand. Probably one of my favorite songs I’ve randomly clicked on, which tends to be the source of most of my music finds, “Dern Kala” slaps, wiggles, climbs, and jams all in orange, green, and turquoise seen through amber marmalade. Here, sound becomes softly psychedelic light and colors, something like the pulse of the universe. At 2:40 into the song, you’ll find me long gone, dancing in the bathroom and thinking about you.
8. Tom Misch – “The Journey”
We’re headed out again, this time on “The Journey,” with Tom Misch as our guide, telling us about peaks and valleys via layered strings, the hard click of a piano key, and a hip hop beat to keep us shuffling along, inviting us into a reverie about the moment our present began, continues, and will end. This song is as simple and as complex as our individual stories. Each time I listen, I wait for 2:59 (an energetic solo), but of course don’t fast forward because it’s all about the journey to get to that roller coast of guitar notes leading me toward the end.
9. Vince Guaraldi – “Autumn Leaves”
From the jubilant melancholy of our recent journey, we move into the melancholy jubilance of Vince Guaraldi’s “Autumn Leaves.” In all of art, I’ve yet to find a piece more evocative of its title. This song is autumn leaves and autumn leaves are this song. Guaraldi’s piano playing conjures up stemmed rust, red, orange, brown, and yellow ovals, diamonds, and stars flitting, tumbling, clinging, and piling up, as wind whirls dresses and tugs at the hats of people in long coats hurrying home towards glowing lamps and the light settling early. There’s also the unmistakable sound that we associate with Charlie Brown holidays (4:17-4:26), adding even more nostalgia to this listening experience. This is the kind of song you want to listen to in the backseat of a car moving swiftly through a fall-suffused city as you grow old and happy.
10. in love with a ghost – “we’ve never met but, can we have coffee or something”
This sparse song is built upon piano and sound effects/common noise: a record player clicking on and getting stuck on static; a clock ticking; a water drop. As a whole, this ambient instrumental sounds like coffee brewing itself as two people step into a cafe to escape the autumn bluster and sit down by the window where they discover each other for the first time as the world continues in muted whirls outside. The haunting distorted vocals chat with an insistent, cascading piano about the robustness of slowness, simplicity, and daring. You’ll want to put a pot on so you can relax and have coffee with your own thoughts.
11. Erik Satie – “Once Upon A Time In Paris”
But time moves on, or rather, backwards in Erik Satie’s 1888 piece. This song is all piano and otherworldly story, as you might guess from its title. With stark but elegant elementariness, Satie weaves piano notes into the texture of a city from any era that evokes nostalgia for the listener-reader. The song is pervaded by movements of loss and recovery, and uproots a comforting wistfulness: it seems to say, Read the fairy tale of your past and accept the ways your own story haunts yourself. You might just end up writing that story while listening to this 15-minute sprawling song in the midst of The Best Study Music Playlist for Deep Thinkers.
12. J Dilla – “Purple (Instrumental)”
We keep things introspective with J Dilla’s lo-fi “Purple” instrumental. This laid-back hip hop beat floats along, borne by the airplane-like-drone swirling in the background, the bobbing bass, and the repetition. Yes, repetition can be good, especially when it so seamlessly buoys the listener. This is the kind of study music instrumental that you want to just pause and chill to, opting not for heavy thoughts, but rather, releasing yourself to the whims of your pen, book, or brain. Yes, this is a 2:20 interlude where you can finally stop shepherding yourself toward arbitrary goals.
13. Pabzzz – “Together”
The poetry of the piano returns in Pabzzz’s “Together,” along with a distinct hip hop beat, a sexy sax that coaxes us into the song and let’s us know it’s okay to stay, and spliced samples of Nas vocals. One of the few voices you’ll hear on The Best Study Music Playlist for Deep Thinkers, Nas isn’t an intrusion, but a reminder that “My poetry’s deep, I never fell.” When that lyric instance of “poetry” hits you on this track, the homage should act like a spark and send you off into a flurry of writing to produce something as rich and distinct as Illmatic. Indeed, Pabzzz’s song quite literally shuts itself off at end, defining itself as threshold that sets us free to indulge in creativity.
14. Aso – “Seasons”
Like other jams on this study music playlist, this song is sonorous with bittersweet nostalgia. Aso combines all of the musical elements I like when brooding — a piano, a hip hop beat, a twangy guitar, and a record scratch and sample — into a piece that instantly awakens the desire to reminisce. This aura of the fresh vintage emanates from the depth of the upright bass, and the gentle fluctuations of the acoustic instruments tugged along by the choo-choo train of the drumkit. Indeed, you might say that this song feels like the memory of perpetually changing seasons — the impossibly complex transitions of weather, flora, fauna, sky, time, and space that carry along our emotions. At this point in your deep thinking, you’ll likely move into the realm of the clouds.
15. Jinsang – “Flow On”
Jinsang’s hip hop beat is truly background study music — in the most complimentary sense of that statement. This muffled, lo-fi piece that features a distinctive sax sample sounds like something you’d hear floating down to the street from the open casement window of an apartment where people are standing around a record player and speaking in smiles and sways to each other. As you walk with the song’s notes now braided into your hair by the breeze, you might notice a new urge to stroll, saunter, and lope: yup, this jazzy song hop-skotches along, stopping and starting, casually ecstatic.
16. VBND – “Let Me Remind”
We get so soulful with this next song, you might find yourself not so much productively thinking as daydreaming of your favorite person and the way they walk. This instrumental pendulates smoothly, sashays fluidly from live instrument to instrument, with the feature being the sax that sidles in at 1:57. Here is the sound of sitting at a bar in the city with your love, murmuring and sipping cocktails peacefully amid ice cube clinks and the bartender’s martini shaker. The guitar that follows speaks of the quiet of the late hours before first light as you and your love amble home together towards sleep, dreams, day, walks.
17. Vanilla – “Traveller”
As you can probably tell, I love fuzzy, warm, jazzy guitar because, quite simply, it makes me happy. Vanilla’s “Traveller” is no exception: it takes guitar samples from Pat Metheny’s already wonderfully positive “Travels,” and turns them into a tune that cures. This is a song that literally cheers the listener on and up via the sample of the audience’s applause bookending the guitar that tightly rambles, looping back upon itself, sending us on a real smooth voyage. And that’s before we even get to 3:20 into the song, at which point the conversation between the guitar, the synths, and the piano sounds like driving through LA in the 90’s, sitting small in the backseat at sunset, seeing the city as it’s dreamed to be: orange, glass, glistening, bungalows, planes, a land of waves gently rolling in place.
18. Penguin Cafe Orchestra – “The sound of someone you love who’s going away and it doesn’t matter”
From breezy guitar we move to bittersweet guitar. Above, I said of “Autumn Leaves” that I’ve yet to find a piece more evocative of its title…but I think I just proved myself wrong. Somehow, this song sounds exactly like “The sound of someone you love who’s going away and it doesn’t matter.” This is a quiet, percussion-less composition that slowly fills up with guitar, xylophone, violin, cello, and more, with this growing instrumental robustness revealing the paradoxical weight of the emptiness and the indifference of a loved one leaving. Indeed, this sound is the moment when you suddenly realize the statement “someone you love” is no longer true. How lovely that we have this singular “sound” from the Penguin Cafe Orchestra to draw out the feels in us. Because with all this brooding, sometimes we forget to sense.
19. The James Moody and Hank Jones Quartet – “Soul Trane”
My, my, my. When this song came on via a music app’s algorithm based on my listening history, illuminating the mid-November night — the first that bore that chill of winter we all long for — with my windows foggy, and the brakelights ahead glowing like Christmas candles, and the streetlamps flickering like lit hearths, and the smell of December’s cozy darkness blossoming crisply in the air like apple cider, I was transported into every past happy family moment simultaneously, suddenly alive with those who are gone. This is a song to have dinner parties to, to fluctuate to, to remember to, to breathe to, to live and think real easily to. The instant timelessness makes it music you can listen to at any moment: that mellow saxophone will always be an invitation and never an intrusion.
20. less.people – “Departure”
At this point, 20 songs into The Best Study Music Playlist for Deep Thinkers, I could just keep going with instrumentals that buoy thought — but, sometimes the best thinking happens after farewell. less.people’s aptly-named “Departure” is here as an outro to pull you from your reverie and start moving on. This is a gentle, preoccupied musical piece that fades in and out, and contains the clamor of windchimes, shushing, water drops, footsteps, and the sense of an ending so that something else may begin.
The Best Study Music Playlist for Deep Thinkers (FULL PLAYLIST)
1 COMMENT
What an ethereal playlist of inspiration-sparking musical pieces. Reading the poetic notes on the beats makes the whole page a delightful playground. This ecstatic time surely enthused me to explore the rest of your blog. I shall thank you in advance, I sense pleasurable reading awaits!