Chris Lawhorn, the resident DJ at Marie Claire and Real Age, reviews 300-400 singles every month, trying to find the best new music for a workout. Every week, he’ll be posting an indie-centric playlist for MAGNET readers. To vote on upcoming tracks, hear this month’s contenders and find more resources for matching songs to the pace of your exercise routine, you can visit his workout music site.
I didn’t start drinking until my fifth year of college. And this was right around the time I’d borrowed the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations boxed set from the library. I remember all of this distinctly because I was so awestruck by the latter (with some help from the former) that I skipped a day of classes and just laid in bed, drinking the weakest White Russians in history and listening to the session tracks for the then-unreleased Smile album. As a kid, my mom had made me a Beach Boys greatest-hits cassette. And the Smile-era music was the other end of that spectrum. But, in listening endlessly to the boxed set, I realized that there was a whole range of material that fell in between. Songs that were as catchy as “Help Me, Rhonda” or “Fun, Fun, Fun,” but were too quirky or didn’t quite chart as high. So for this week’s workout playlist, I wanted focus on the Beach Boys hits that my mom couldn’t fit on a 60 minute cassette—but that would have been the highlights of most any other band’s career.
3. “This Whole World” (119 BPM)
4. “Bluebirds Over The Mountain” (127 BPM)
5. “Heroes And Villains” (137 BPM)