In 2020, I was working for a consultancy company on a team delivering a major change for a government client. We were a tight-knit team, and enjoyed working together.

A tradition was for one or another (or a third) team member to post into the chat system a link to a Youtube video, which would be the "song for the day" to give us energy. It didn't happen every day; maybe once or twice a week.

I never posted anything, though, and the excuse I make for this is that by the time I thought to do so it was always too late.

Anyway, I resigned in the autumn of 2020, when we were all confined to our home offices for pandemical reasons.

As a bit of fun during my near-interminable notice period, I resolved to prepare a play list, and to post a link to a song from it every day for the last month of my time with the company. I've just rediscovered that playlist, so I'm posting it here.

I remember I had a few rules I wanted to stick to when I was preparing the list:

• Each song would have to be meaningful to me.
• I would not post more than one song from any artist.
• There would have to be an even mix of women and men artists. Where the performer was a group, they would go into the "men" bucket if the group was made up only of men, the "women" bucket if all members were "women" and they would be considered 50% men and 50% women if the group was a mix.
• It had to start with O Fortuna from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, because – frankly – everything should start with that.
• It had to end with Tom Lehrer's We Will All Go Together When We Go, because it always seemed to me to be a great farewell song!

I don't know if everyone watched/listened to the songs (if you were on the team, you could let me know in the comments below!). It was fun, though, including the compiling and the planning of the playlist.

Here it is. Enjoy.

Seq#	Song/piece	Performer/Composer/	Comment
01	O Fortuna	Carl Orff
02	Tom Traubert's Blues	Tom Waits	Tom's best song. Would never leave it out.
03	Pound The Alarm	Nicki Minaj	Love the beat of this one.
04	Lovely Head	Goldfrapp	Beautiful atmosphere to this song.
05	Where have you been	Rihanna	Another one with a beat that I enjoy.
06	Our Love Goes Deeper Than This	Duke Special	Brilliant, fun performance with Neil Hannon.
07	Body's In Trouble	Mary Margaret O Hara	Brings back nice memories of the '90s for me.
08	Knowing Me Knowing You	ABBA	Suggested by my daughter. Seemed appropriate.
09	White Rabbit	Grace Slick	One of my most favourite songs. She here about this "isolated vocals" version.
10	The Old Dark Machine	James Vincent McMorrow	There are many great songs on his first album, Early In The Morning, but this was the best one at the time I was thinking about this.
11	Dark Horse	Katy Perry	Another great fun song.
12	Songs of Love	Neil Hannon	Another brilliant, fun performance with Duke Special.
13	Never Get Old	Sinéad O Connor	Brings me back to the '80s.
14	Just A Gigolo	Louis Prima	I've always enjoyed this song; reminds me of The Goons, Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Eric Sykes.
15	Cloudbusting	Kate Bush	Kate is a genius, and this is one of her best songs.
16	Lonely Planet	The The	From 1993, this was the first cultural assertion I remember of the impending disaster that Climate Change is.
17	Aint got no, I got love	Nina Simone	Another fun song.
18	Clint Eastwood	Gorillaz	There's something about this song that has me humming it to myself nearly daily since its release more than 20 years ago.
19	Revolution	Diplo	One of the nicer tunes to to exercise with, IMO.
20	Lay Me Low	Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds	A finale song. I love its fierceness.
21	Leaving On A Jet Plane	Mary O Hara	Another finale song. I remember hearing it when I was a small child as my mother played it.
22	We Will All Go Together When We Go	Tom Lehrer	The final finale song.

---