An overdue reunion (with a soundtrack)

Earlier this month, I had the occasion to attend the centennial celebration of my fraternity at my first alma mater (Gamma Phi Zeta of Lambda Chi Alpha at W&L). This obviously will elicit some questions from you. For example: “You were in a fraternity? What were you thinking?” and “What on earth does that have to do with your usual topics?”

I’ll answer each of these in turn—one briefly and the other in more depth. First, yes I was in a fraternity and I made some of the best friends of my life there. As to why? Well, that’s a topic for another day as that really isn’t what concerns me today.

Now to the second question. As more people accepted, among them some of those aforementioned great friends, and the date approached. My friend Krista posed an interesting question in a running group chat amongst a few of us: surely the weekend deserved a playlist, why don’t we collaborate on one? So of course, we were off and running.

I started a collaborative playlist on Spotify and we agreed to certain ground rules (though they weren’t hard and fast): namely, that we should add only songs that were contemporaneous with our time in Lexington, VA. This extended a bit beyond our graduation dates of 1991 and 1992, since three of us lingered there or returned there after graduate school up until the spring of 1994. So we had a range of roughly songs that were current from 1987 until 1994. This of course included earlier songs that were such a part of the soundtrack of our college years that they simply had to be included.

Over the course of a week or so before all of us travelled back to Lexington to meet up with the one who had moved back there a decade or so ago, we collaboratively pulled together some 265 songs (or almost 18 hours worth) to serve as the extended soundtrack for the weekend.

I know that I used the playlist pretty much the entire week before as my daily listening as well as for the 7 hour drive to Virginia from Atlanta. So without further ado, I present the playlist in all of its late 80s/early 90s glory. So many good songs. I hope you enjoy.