Best Of R Kelly Songs Playlist

[Ena Marklund]

Anyonewho knows me knows I love Machine Gun Kelly. To be completely honest, I never listened to any of his music until last year when one of my friends showed me a song she really liked from his new album. I was like hm, I kind of like this, and that led me to explore his music starting with his new album.

Anyhoo, I started with that album when I was exploring his music, but I did also explore his music that came before and I did also find a lot that I liked. Once I got a taste for what songs I really liked, I threw them into a playlist that would become my go-to playlist and would later become my depression anthems. I would play this playlist over and over again all throughout the day just to make it through. Most of the days, I was just sitting on the couch staring at the wall, being too depressed to do anything.

I can't imagine breaking up with someone whom you were married to and had children with, but I do know what heartache feels like. It sucks. One of the ways I got over my few heartbreaks was through music. I played a LOT of Kelly songs because tbh she makes the absolute best, most fiery breakup tracks.

I created a collaborative playlist on Spotify dedicated to Kelly's best breakup / heartbreak songs. It's collaborative in that anyone can add to it, not just me. I'd love to have Exhale's participation, so if any of us go through what Kelly is going through, we have this to cling onto.

"I don't wanna tough

And I don't wanna be proud

I don't need to be fixed and I certainly don't need to be found

I'm not lost

I need to be loved

I just need to be loved

I just wanna be loved by you and I won't stop 'cause I believe

That maybe, yeah, maybe"

When I was writing A More Beautiful Question, or, more accurately when I was procrastinating from writing the book, I began compiling the below list of songs that have questions in the title AND that I like (for the most part). Then four years later, I once again turned to this playlist while researching and writing my follow-up book, The Book of Beautiful Questions.

I've heard you can tell many things about people based on their playlist. I'm not convinced. My playlist is all over the place, which means I'm all over the place. Wait a minute! There might be something to this theory....

Doublecreek has 2 playlists. The songs we sing at sing song and on the bus come from one playlist. Our sing song playlist has remained fairly consistent over the years. I came across a counselor training manual from way back in the day. I counted 34 songs on the list. Some songs we still sing! Some songs we haven't sung since the previous millennium. Occassionally, a counselor asks for a song that they remember from their camper days. This creates a problem. We're singing a song that maybe 5 people can sing. Sing song goes flat when 5 people are singing and over 300 are wondering why we are singing that song.

We have a second playlist at Camp Doublecreek, also! This is our list of games. Counting small group games, large group games, and sit down games, we have over 50 games specfic to Doublecreek. This playlist is very fluid. It's hard to believe but during the early years of Doublecreek, we rarely played soccer. We played football. Especially when it rained. Mud football was a BLAST! Of course, we've always had kickball, but later we developed blooperball! What's Blooperball you ask? It is the Doublecreek version of softball, except, we use a tennis ball. From day one, older campers have played volleyball, while younger campers played newcomb. Newcomb is a throw and catch version of volleyball. Apparently, we play newcomb differently from everyone else. It's gratifying to have campers say that they prefer our version!

Tag games have always been the rage at Camp Doublecreek. We played the golden oldies: Freeze tag, statues in the park, and basic 'tag, you're it'. We now have several large group tag games: Wolf over the River and Colored Eggs (this is a camper favorite -- I think because campers get to yell, "Flush down the toilet!").

Ever heard of Blob, Capture the Flag, Steal the Bacon, or Humans vs. Zombies? These are staples on our playlist. I've watched Humans vs. Zombies several times. I'm still trying to figure that game out. Our newest large group game is Lava Lake. Lava Lake is a ramped-up version of sharks and minnows. The games we play are not totally original, but we play them with a twist......a Doublecreek twist!

See, this is awesome. All I want in the world right now is detailed reasons/explanations for why people have picked specific songs for specific parts of this book. I adore music that fits moods, and especially the concept of music to suit the ACOTAR universe: THANK YOU!! You did awesome! (Now how can we get Sarah Maas to add notes to HER Spotify playlists?? ?)

To find more workout songs, folks can check out the free database at Run Hundred. Visitors can browse the song selections there by genre, tempo and era to find the music that best fits their particular workout routine.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: This year will mark a decade since I realized I was going deaf. Now, I've talked about this some publicly, but for those who don't know, I have severe to profound hearing loss. I host this program wearing hearing aids in both ears. So it was with special interest that I picked up the new memoir "Soundtrack Of Silence." The author, Matt Hay, has struggled with his hearing since he was a kid. As he grew up, his hearing got worse and then worse. In college, he found out he had NF2, neurofibromatosis type 2. It's a rare genetic condition that caused tumors to grow on the nerves that transmit sound to his brain. As his hearing disappeared, Hay found that one of the things he missed most was music, and music has also been his path back to partial hearing. Matt Hay, welcome.MATT HAY: Thank you. I'm excited to be here.KELLY: Describe the moment when you learned you were losing your hearing and you were going to fully lose it and that it was irreversible.HAY: It's a very sobering moment when you come to, like, the acceptance of, like, hey; there's this steamroller coming, and it's really far away. But eventually, it's going to get here. It's almost - it would be, like, a fun bar game to sit around with your friends and say, hey; if you had to create your greatest hits playlist for life, what would it be? It's a lot less fun when you very literally have to be thinking, what songs do I want stuck in my head for the rest of my life?KELLY: You do write beautifully about the very last song you heard with your own ears, George Harrison's "Here Comes The Sun." Can you tell me, like, where you were, what you remember about hearing it?HAY: I remember a lot about that day because, you know, my hearing was - you mentioned your hearing loss being gradual, and thank you for sharing that. I think it's wonderful that you - how open you've been about sharing that. But that steamroller was coming, was coming. And one day, I woke up, and I could just tell things were different. I went into work, and everybody sounded like Charlie Brown's teacher. Something was different. And I came back home, and my wife knew something was wrong 'cause I came back home midday in a cab, and we didn't have money to be taking cabs. And so I got there, and she was waiting at the door, and I said, I think it's happening. And I didn't have to offer any more detail. We were at a point in our lives where, you know, we hadn't been married long, but she knew exactly what I meant.And we hugged. We cried. And she's just a wonderful, wonderful person, and I think anybody that read this story will see she's the hero of the story. And she said, OK, what do you want to do? And we knew enough sign language, and I can hear a little and read - lip read a little and that - I picked that up. What do you want to do? And I thought about it for a minute of the - what's the last thing you want to hear? And maybe chalk this up to young love, but I chalk it up to she's got a really great laugh. The last thing I wanted to hear was the thing that made me happiest - was making her laugh. So we decided to go out to our favorite Mexican place. Looking back on that now, it's funny to me to think what the other patrons must have been thinking of. Like, why is she yelling such sweet things to that kid?KELLY: (Laughter).HAY: And we went home that night, and we woke up the next day, and we had a little CD player. And every morning, we woke up to "Here Comes The Sun."(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HERE COMES THE SUN")THE BEATLES: (Singing) Here comes the sun, and I say, it's all right.HAY: And the next day, I woke up, and there was no "Here Comes The Sun." And the best way I can describe that is I woke up that day, and sound became a memory.KELLY: That was how many years ago?HAY: This was 2004.KELLY: I'll explain to people. You're sitting about five feet away from me. We're talking. You can hear me. How does it work?HAY: So one plus of losing your hearing slowly is you accidentally become a really good lip-reader. I can tell you what most NFL coaches are saying on the sidelines.KELLY: (Laughter).HAY: And it's usually not very sweet.KELLY: So you're reading my lips.HAY: B, I also am very fortunate that I have what is called an auditory brainstem implant. So shortly after losing my hearing, we had already talked to a lot of audiologists, a lot of EMTs. And just four years prior, the FDA had approved an auditory brainstem implant, or an ABI. So they put this little electrode of - 12 electrodes as a little flyswatter that they sew directly to your brainstem. And I had that done at the House Ear Institute in LA, which is the world's leading facility for this. So the expectation was that I would hear life noises, which is, like, oven timers and police sirens. But when you can't hear anything other than timers and police sirens, it's pretty romantic.KELLY: Yeah. So I mean, long story short, you've had many surgeries. You've had implants. You're - there's an external device on the left side of your head, over your ear...HAY: Yeah.KELLY: ...That's visible. You are able to partially hear.HAY: I am, though this conversation now, to answer your question, is reflective of 18 years of audio rehabilitation and working every day to - they said oven timers and police sirens, and four years later, I heard oven timers and police sirens. But that's where music came back into play - is...KELLY: Yeah. What was - how did music help?HAY: Well, the prompt was - at that point, we now had newborn twins. And I remember laying in bed and all of the work my wife had to do because there's so much work for her in general in that circumstance but also with me not being able to hear them. One night, one of the babies was crying, and I couldn't tell which one, and it terrified me. And I spent a lot of time thinking, what can I do to get better? - 'cause what I'm doing is not working. And I just had this notion of, well, I have these songs in my head, and I would go out running and have these songs in my head with no AirPods - just brain memory. And I thought, I wonder if listening to that music can help. What if music could become the Rosetta Stone so that my brain can tell - now tell my ABI, no, no, you've got it wrong? The opening to "Let It Be" is (vocalizing).(SOUNDBITE OF THE BEATLES SONG, "LET IT BE")HAY: After a year of that, no change. After another year of that, no change. And one day, we got in the car, and Nora turned on the radio. My wife, Nora, turned on the radio, and then she turned it down really quickly so we can hear better when we talk 'cause when I'm not there, she rocks out. And I grabbed her wrist, and I said, is this "Crazy Game Of Poker" by O.A.R.?(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THAT WAS A CRAZY GAME OF POKER")O A R: (Singing) Don't know what to do unless I retire, and he just said...HAY: 'Cause I very distinctly heard, I said, Johnny, what you doing tonight?(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THAT WAS A CRAZY GAME OF POKER")O A R: (Singing) So I said, Johnny, what you doing tonight?HAY: And for the first time, we'd - something happened that we were told would never happen, and that - and I get goosebumps telling you about this now - is that...KELLY: Yeah.HAY: ...I heard music. I'm deaf. I'm deaf, and I heard music. And I'm...KELLY: God, I have goosebumps thinking about what that must have been like after years of not hearing.HAY: It is - I know. I tried to do it in words, but it's just hard to convey that moment.KELLY: And how do you explain this? This is your brain relearning or finding new pathways to do something...HAY: It is my brain...KELLY: ...It once was able to do.HAY: ...Relearning to hear.KELLY: And it had to figure...HAY: I wish I were a neurosurgeon...KELLY: Yeah.HAY: ...Or neuroscientist so I could explain the process. But what I found out afterward in getting to know some really wonderful audiologists is music therapy was being tested at the University of Texas, at Vanderbilt, at some of the leading audiology programs in the country, and they were all testing it in theory. So all of a sudden, I became a - my brain became a pretty popular test subject for a lot of folks that were - had thought about this in theory. And I think it was really just - our brains are pretty magical, and we don't understand all that they do. But when your brain knows something, it doesn't forget.KELLY: Yeah. Matt Hay - his memoir is titled "Soundtrack Of Silence: Love, Loss, And A Playlist For Life." This has been a real pleasure. Thank you.HAY: Thank you.(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HERE COMES THE SUN")THE BEATLES: (Singing) Here comes the sun. Here comes the sun.

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