Apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought Gogol Bordello would make for good New Year’s tunes. Unbeknownst to those of us dancing along with Super Taranta! in Richmond, Mr. Bordello was at that very moment helping a rowdy bunch of San Franciscans ring in 2013 at an 8-hour mini festival called Sea of Dreams. How did I find out about this? Well, it has everything to do with a photo taken by Robert DeLong, the LA-based singer/songwriter/producer responsible for the fantastic track at the bottom of this post.

While I was working on Wednesday’s post about my overly ambitious New Year’s Eve playlist, I was sidetracked by my new favorite blog, Brain Pickings, which bills itself as “a library of cross-disciplinary interestingness and combinatorial creativity.” The interestingness in question was a link to Amazon’s “Rising Stars of 2013” sampler, which consists of 16 free mp3s — a don’t-mind-if-I-do situation if I’ve ever seen one.

And while I’m sure the other 15 tracks are lovely (especially the Black Prairie one — I’ve enjoyed everything of theirs that I’ve heard so far), I didn’t manage to make it past the first one, Robert DeLong’s “Global Concepts.” I was too busy scurrying around the Internet trying to find more information about the person who made this instantaneously lovable song, which is how I ended up on DeLong’s Twitter feed, which is where I found the picture of Gogol Bordello “bringing in the new year,” which is what tipped me off to the fact that both of these guys played the Sea of Dreams thing, which is when I realized that everything is connected and we’re all part of one universal being that’s living and breathing in a most unlikely and beautiful act of profound unity.

Or maybe it’s a coincidence.

Whatevs.

I’m just happy I found out about DeLong, whose full-length album is due out February 5. Check out “Global Concepts” below, which actually does share some scary thematic similarities with what I wrote about Gogol Bordello yesterday.

Robert DeLong — “Global Concepts” [Spotify/iTunes]