The Song Relay Game

If, owing to either age or temperament, you are no longer in the market for big drunken New Year’s Eve ragers, you may be planning a small quiet get-together with a few friends tonight. Let me humbly suggest a little game I made up a few years ago for such occasions, which I’ve enjoyed playing many times since.

I call it The Song Relay Game, and the rules are incredibly simple: Someone chooses and plays a song. Then the next person selects a song that is connected the previous one in some way. You have until the end of the previous song to select your own, and you have to explain the link between them to the group when yours comes on. Rinse and repeat for as many cycles as you find it entertaining.

The connection can be whatever you like. Maybe they were both used in Volkswagen commercials. Maybe the lyrics use the same unusual word. Maybe your song followed the last one on a mix tape you made in high school. Maybe they both have sax solos. Maybe they deal with similar themes. It is, however, more fun if either the connection is something a bit non-obvious, or the transition is between two very different-sounding songs, or both. “These are both REM songs” would be a rather boring transition; “Prolific session drummer Hal Blaine played on both tracks” is more interesting.

Assuming you’re doing this with some kind of digital music streaming app more platform, and pick all the songs on the same account, one nice perk is that you end up with a playlist in your account history as a little souvenir of the evening.

Here, for example, is the playlist of the first time I played the game. Some of the connections are a little obscure to me now, but I recall picking Nirvana’s “Something in the Way” to follow Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge”—not because both are 90s bands (boring) but because “Something in the Way” plays during a scene in Matt Reeves’ The Batman where a morose Bruce Wayne is walking under a bridge in the rain. “Lovefool” by The Cardigans follows Radiohead’s “Talk Show Host” because both were on the soundtrack for Romeo and Juliet, which the staff of the bookstore I worked in as a teen used to put on after closing to restock the shelves. Kesha’s “TikTok” follows “Lisztomania” by Phoenix because both were used in viral early-aughts YouTube mashup videos made by fans. And I’m particularly tickled by the transition from Styx’s “Come Sale Away” to T-Pain & This Lonely Island’s “I’m on a Boat” to “How Far I’ll Go” from Moana—where the link is obvious, but the segues are still absurd and surprising. (And yes, you can probably tell we were all 40-somethings who paid peak attention to pop music in the 90s and early aughts.)

Go forth, try it out, and report back with your results!