Playlist: 2026.11 | You Make Me Feel Alive

This is W Department, translated into sound.

There wasn’t an October playlist. Sometimes the calendar moves faster than the music comes together. By the time you return, the light has changed.

November here sharpens that feeling. Coats come out, clocks change, and the smell of piñon smoke drifts in. I like that inward pull, that weight of another layer, the pleasure of finding somewhere warm and staying.

That’s where this playlist starts for me— warmth, the feeling of being gathered in, then reaching for a bit of air, rhythm, movement, and eventually light again.

A familiar record sounds different in November than it did in May. You bring something else to it; the adjacent songs shift the meaning. Putting these together is a way of noticing what I’m drawn to as the year moves along.

There’s a stretch here where I wanted the atmosphere to deepen and give you space to lose your sense of the hour a little. These are the moments when listening becomes physical almost without your noticing—a shift in breathing, shoulders loosening, a rhythm you’ve started following before you realize you’re moving.

Then that movement comes forward. Even as the season pulls us indoors, there’s still that wish to be with people, to turn something up, to let an evening become more than you planned.

You Make Me Feel Alive. There’s affection in that title. For another person, certainly, but also for the things that bring us back into contact with ourselves. Music has always done that for me.

After that lift, I like ending with somewhere quieter, but still not finished.

For the early dark, for a room filling with friends, for the drive home afterward. A little warmth to carry further into the year.

—Christopher Webster

Track List

  • Sunshine
    Cleo Sol
  • Marra Fi Ghnina
    Soapkills
  • Kiss the Sky
    Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra, Nino Moschella
  • Woman’s Touch
    Yussef Dayes, Jamilah Barry
  • Simple Things
    Zero 7, Mozez
  • Shuteye
    Presley Regier
  • Fire on the Water
    Bonobo, Arooj Aftab
  • Sola Sistim
    Underworld
  • Le Monde
    Thievery Corporation
  • Eyes Off You
    Polar Inc., XIRA
  • On My Knees
    RÜFÜS DU SOL
  • Dancing
    Jorja Smith
  • Breathe
    Alfa Mist
  • Ecto
    Cyst, Iglooghost, daisy*
  • Nocturnal Lady
    Noé Solange
  • Your Girl
    Blue States