This weekend, instead of properly paying attention to me, Kamran combed YouTube for all of the songs listed in New York magazine’s Brooklyn Top 40, the top 40 songs coming out of Brooklyn and defining what it means to be indie right now. He made a playlist of them, which you can enjoy here:

I feel so close to all of these artists somehow. Both physically, because I live down the street from them, but also . . . not spiritually, because that’s lame, but somehow like spiritually, because this sound is so distinctly Brooklyn to me, and I feel so distinctly Brooklyn myself.

While we sat on Kamran’s loveseat, him reading cases for law school and me scanning blogs as we listened to the playlist for the second time, he looked over and said, “We should be doing this!” I said, “Oh, um, I don’t know if we could do this.” He said, “Well, not THIS. This is good.”

This is the song he was talking about:

We decided that when we need to feel better about ourselves and how easy making music is, we’ll listen to this:

I forget sometimes that I’m so freakin’ lucky to live in a city where this stuff is being made and is readily available to me. I saw Crystal Stilts open for Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, saw Amazing Baby open for Cold War Kids, saw MGMT play in an abandoned pool, saw The Dirty Projectors play on the Williamsburg waterfront. Remind me of this when I say I can’t be out at a show until 2 on a weeknight.