Shuffle Synchronicities 🔀✨Returns
Shuffle Synchronicities—the NPR-celebrated and formerly Top 25 in Music Substack—is back!
What began as a memoir is now a teaching.
Learn how something greater communicates with us through the music we love.
What Is Shuffle Synchronicities?
You may have stumbled upon the phenomenon yourself, with me here, or perhaps seen it trending recently on TikTok as Shufflemancy…
The idea is simple: You ask a question, hit shuffle on your music player, and interpret the first song that plays.
This often taps into the power of Synchronicity, which has many definitions, but here’s one:
SYNCHRONICITY
When an external event coincides meaningfully with our inner experience
How Is It Helpful?
When our inner experience meaningfully coincides with an external event.
We become aware of a correspondence between ourselves and something greater.
We can then work with this communication to help us guide our half of life.
SHUFFLE SYNCHRONICITIES
How Meaningful Music Coincidences Can Help Us Co-Curate Our Life
History
Shuffle Synchronicities was Top 25 in the paid Music category of Substack
Its year of daily memoir was featured on NPR
And it included 50 guest posts from Rolling Stone and Pitchfork journalists, musicians, micro-niche famous meme admins, and many more (full list here)
Volume 2
Expanded to Podcasts with live shuffles and resulting Podscripts
Experimented with Post-Memoir—an ethical aesthetic approach to memoir writing that effaces personal identifiers
Now
Shuffle Synchronicities is transforming into a Teaching
Expect them twice a month
Plus Videos/Podcasts with Musicians
My Shuffle Journal updated daily in Post-Memoir style is available to all
Who Am I?
Dave Cowen ☀️💛
Published by The New Yorker & McSweeney’s
Books featured in The New York Times
And one that Wikipedia lists as perhaps the longest sentence in the English language🏅
Find more at my linktree 🔗🌴
Example
A question about how to handle Paid Subscriptions 🔐
Led to a Shuffle 🔀 ✨
Resulting in…
“Price Tag” by Jessie J, B.o.B
With lyrics like:
Seems like everybody's got a price
I wonder how they sleep at night
When the sale comes first and the truth comes second
And:
It's not about the money, money, money
We don't need your money, money, money
We just wanna make the world dance
Forget about the price tag
🤯
It initially seems like everything should be free?
But I believe the Shuffle is truly saying:
Even a song idealizing giving away your creative service to others for free.
Still has to be paid for.
So, please consider a Paid Subscription!
Your support finances the time, energy, and resources needed to produce this work.
Produced by
Shuffle Synchronicities is produced by the creator of SerioComics.
A Substack that is weekly enthusiasms for works of graphic literature that are partly serious partly comic.
As the author works toward a debut:
A like-minded newlywed couple in Austin, Texas is shocked after a mugging to find themselves debating gun ownership, their plans to start a family, and even stay together
Works enthused so far include:
CALVIN AND HOBBES written and drawn by Bill Watterson, published by Andrews McMeel
IT'S LIFE AS I SEE IT: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940 - 1980 compiled & edited by Dan Nadel, published by New York Review Comics & Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
FUN HOME written and drawn by Alison Bechdel, published by Houghton Mifflin then Mariner Books
THE PRINCE AND THE DRESSMAKER written and drawn by Jen Wang, published by First Second and Macmillan
SUPERMAN from ACTION COMICS NO. 1 written by Jerry Siegel, drawn by Joe Shuster, published by Detective Comics, now DC Comics
Plus Q&A’s with Susan Beneville, Rex Ogle/Rey Terciero, and Amaris Ketcham.
And much more…
Monthly Gun Debate Update
There is also a monthly gun debate update as part of Serio Comics for those interested.
Thank you!
Whether you’re passionate about music and meaningful coincidences.
Exploring graphic literature and the gun debate.
Or someone else’s work on Substack.
There’s something here for everyone.
And I hope you find, enjoy, and support it!
