40@40 (2016)

I spent two years in Scotland as a religious missionary, moving through cities and small towns, riding trains and buses, meeting people who welcomed me into their homes. I grew to love all of it, the countryside, the pace of life, the conversations, and the feeling of trying to adapt to something new. I changed how I spoke, what I ate, how I carried myself. It became part of me.

Many of the tracks on these birthday mixes are tied to that time. Scottish artists bring me back quickly. Their voices, their phrasing, the way they tell stories, it all connects to those memories.

The Glasgow accent from CHVRCHES does that immediately. It takes me back to long days moving through the city, to buses and train platforms, and especially to the people of Drumchapel who opened their homes to me again and again. "The Mother We Share" brings all of that back immediately, the sound of Glasgow, the movement of the city, and the people who made it feel like home.

What I love most about Sarah Blasko's "Spanish Ladies" isn't just the melody. It's the language. The song is full of proper sailing vocabulary, the kind of words that belong to another century and another kind of life: clew-garnet, main-brace, shank painter, foreyard. A clew-garnet, I learned, is simply a rope used to haul up the corner of a sail. A practical thing. A working thing. But in the song it feels romantic and windswept. These aren't decorative nautical references. They're the language of people who actually worked and lived on the sea. I love that the lyrics don't slow down to translate themselves. They assume you're already on deck, hands on the lines, canvas snapping in your ear, bracing against the wind.

Like many good rabbit holes, the seemingly unrelated event that led me to this version of the song began with reading Washington's Spies: The Story of America's First Spy Ring, a book about ordinary people, friends, merchants, farmers, family members, not soldiers, who quietly built a spy network to feed George Washington information about British troop movements. Years later, when the story became the television series Turn: Washington's Spies, there's a scene near the end of an early episode where a smuggler slips away into the night in a small rowboat, and Sarah Blasko's voice rises through water and fog as the credits roll. I already loved a good sea shanty, and this song was familiar, but this version felt fuller, as if it carried more life.

Versions of "Spanish Ladies" surface everywhere once you start looking: Quint drunkenly singing it in Jaws (1975), which I tucked in as the hidden track on this mix; echoes in a favorite show of mine, The Mentalist; sailors moving through Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. The song drifts through modern projects the way it once drifted across real oceans, passed from crew to crew, voice to voice.

As I follow the lyrics and let the melody pull me further down the rabbit hole, I start thinking about all the unknown voices who have sung it before, in storms, in boredom, in long stretches of waiting for land, and for a moment I feel connected to that long chain of people stretching back through centuries.