My good friend Lindsey Mineff and I gave each other an artistic prompt recently. Here’s the dirt: We each made a playlist of songs we like on youtube for each other. We then needed to create a piece of art inspired by or while listening to each other’s respective playlists.

The playlist she made can be found here.
The poem I wrote as a result of listening is here.

The line that most directly relates to her playlist is “a song in the shape of a rabbit” and if you notice, the third video on her list is “Who Can Win a Rabbit” by Animal Collective. Mostly, I attempted to capture the mood and movement of her selections while borrowing a few lines from bits and pieces of some of my unfinished poems. I find it interesting that Lindsey and I both decided to revisit unfinished projects for this prompt rather than start from scratch.

The playlist I created for Lindsey is here.
Lindsey is a photographer by trade (Check out her amazing photos) but while listening to my compilation she decided to paint. She painted a piece that pays homage to Dr. Suess’ famous piece “Fooling Nobody.” She entitled her Suess-inspired painting “Fooling Everybody.”

Lindsey had this to say:
I originally started in early July and when I did I was trying to replicate Suess’ original exactly. I got very frustrated because he painted his ink on paint and I was painting well, paint on paint…I stopped working on it for over a month. When I decided I was going to finish it no matter what…I worked on it while I played your playlist. I don’t know if I can say at exactly which song it all started to come together but I realized I was better off making it more my own. That’s when I started to make it more of a ‘pop art’ version of the original.

Lindsey and I would like to challenge you to find someone to do this exercise with and share your playlists and artistic results here. Or, create a playlist, leave it as a comment, and maybe someone will use it as a prompt. I might just post the results! Good luck!

Ain’t no way to explain or say
How painful the hangover was today
In front of the toilet, hands and knees
Trying to breathe in between the dry heaves
My baby made me some coffee
Afraid that if I drink some it’s probably coming right back out me
Couple of advil, relax and chill
At a standstill with how bad I feel
I think I need to smell fresh hair
So I stepped out the back door and fell down the stairs
The sunlight hit me dead in the eye
Like it’s mad I gave half the day to last night…