Oh man, do I ever get carried away on these things. What started as a simple effort to craft a cool quarantine playlist for the masses soon morphed into a manic attempt to put together the best list of psychedelic and progressive songs ever assembled by anyone. I'm nothing if not modest.
My original thought was that since we're all stuck in our houses, why not assemble some far out tunes that will take you to other planets, dimensions, and realities? And since many of us are spending extra time with significant others or roommates who may not share our love of, say, progressive black metal, I decided to make the playlist completely palatable to someone who does not like metal. But I still wanted to make sure the songs had plenty of awesome instrumental interplay and moments of melancholic introspection to excite a large swathe of metal listeners.
So I started pulling my favorite epic psychedelic prog and that's when things got out of hand. There's just way too much of this music that I love and wanted to share with you. So I actually ended up making two versions of the playlist. There's "Psychedelic Voyages – The Essentials," which is a shorter, but still totally awesome collection of some of my favorite psychedelic and progressive music. Then there's "Psychedelic Voyages – The Deep Dive." This a 10+ hour monster that has still been very carefully curated, song by song. Most of this stuff is from the 70s with a handful of modern gems thrown in. I even snuck in a couple of metal bands.
As much as it pained me, both playlists are limited to one song per band and have been sequenced to play in a pleasing order, although the larger list is also great for shuffling.
By the way, I'm a huge fan of music like this and I have a voracious appetite for more, so if you know of other songs or bands that I may not know, by all means name them in the comments.
Check out the previous playlists here.
