The Monthly Mixtape: May 2025
Hey there, music lovers! Welcome to another edition of Word of Mouth's Monthly Mixtape series, where we share the soundtrack that's been fueling our creative engines each month. You know how sometimes a song just perfectly captures your mood or helps you power through that challenging project? That's exactly what these playlists are all about.
These mixtapes are inspired by everything from the shows we've been binging to the coffee shops where we've been camping out with our laptops. You'll find a delightful mix of new discoveries, tracks that are new to us, and those beloved classics that never seem to lose their magic. Consider this our musical journal, a little window into what's been inspiring us lately.
Sometimes nature delivers the most unexpected teachers.
I stepped onto my back deck one early afternoon this month, ready for a quiet moment, only to discover I was sharing my space with 10,000 uninvited guests.
Bees. Everywhere.
Not the chaotic, panicked kind of swarming you might imagine, but something more purposeful — they were gathering, organizing, preparing for something bigger.
At first, it was overwhelming. The air thick with movement, the sound a nervous roar, like the all-consuming, ever-increasing volume of Hans Zimmer's droning in The Dark Knight. But as I watched, mesmerized, I began to understand what I was witnessing: swarm intelligence in action. When a hive grows too large, the colony makes an extraordinary collective decision to divide. A new queen emerges, and thousands of bees surround her in protective formation, searching for their new home together. It's collaboration born from abundance, not scarcity.
After some quick research, I reached out to the Alameda County Beekeepers Association — a volunteer organization that rescues exactly these kinds of "rogue" swarms. Within hours, a volunteer beekeeper arrived with poles, brood comb, and bucket, scaling my tree to safely relocate the entire colony to their new beginning. Here's the remarkable rescue in action.
There's something profound about witnessing thousands of individual beings move as one organism, each playing their part in a larger purpose. It reminded me why collective harmony resonates so deeply in music — and partially why this month's playlist leans heavily into supremely chill, contemplative sounds that mirror that sense of flow and unity.
Most of these tracks were curated during a Southern California road trip, where I caught Devo at Cruel World fest and stepped into a galaxy far, far away at Disneyland's Galaxy's Edge. Ironically, neither of those experiences directly inspired the music here. Instead, the playlist captures the meditative headspace of long drives, basking in the extended golden hour of longer days, and quiet moments between destinations.
