Be Greater. MIXTAPE
🌎📡 Garrett’s Mixtape for a Greater World – 29 songs, 6 decades, 1 message. 💚 Listen in order. Enjoy :) Download to listen offline. Read along at: begreater.co/mixtape
🌎📡 [ begin transmission ] :
Welcome :) You’re reading Be Greater. Thanks for tuning in
*This mixtape and post are going live on 6.30.2026
Spotify / YouTube / Apple
Happy International Asteroid Day. ☄️
Today is the anniversary of The Tunguska Event — A mysterious massive explosion that occurred over Russia on June 30, 1908 (118 years ago).
A large space rock barely missed Earth, but it entered the atmosphere and exploded from the friction and pressure, which released an estimated 10 to 15 megatons of energy. Equivalent to 10-15 million tons of TNT and 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the explosion leveled 830 square miles of forest and flattened approx. 80 million trees.
Let this day serve as a reminder that we are all tiny in this universe. Everything we do will be erased by nature eventually.
So don’t take it all so seriously, you’ll never make it out alive.
Happy 2026. Happy 250th Birthday to America.
And a happy life to you all. Please enjoy my MIXTAPE for a Greater World.
The Be Greater. MIXTAPE
Songs for a greater world.
This is a playlist containing 29 songs from the years 1964 to 2023.
Six decades of music. Six decades of life lessons, experiences, and cultural observations condensed down into two hours of art.
I made this mixtape in hopes of inspiring people. To see the world as it is, to understand the good and the bad, accept it all, learn to love it, and still commit to making it better.
It examines the world, our search for meaning, and the collective human experience.
Turn on Do Not Disturb. Set aside any distractions.
Go for a drive. Or sit on a beach and watch the sunset.
Whatever you do, just turn up the radio, open your mind, and listen.
Here’s the tape:
Spotify — Be Greater. MIXTAPE
YouTube — Be Greater. MIXTAPE
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBOOo7cI99WU
YouTube Music — Be Greater. MIXTAPE
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBOOo7cI99WU
Apple Music — Be Greater. MIXTAPE
https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/be-greater-mixtape/pl.u-r2yB16XCdb3XVo
1. Intro — The xx (2009)
No words. Just sound.
One of the most stirring pieces of music ever recorded, and it never speaks a single word. Just pure feelings.
This is two minutes of space before the story begins. Let your previous thoughts fade away, open your mind, and really listen to the message of the mixtape.
2. What’s Going On — Marvin Gaye (1971)
Marvin Gaye’s brother Frankie came home from Vietnam different. Changed in ways that were hard to describe and impossible to ignore.
Marvin was already in a dark place. His duet partner Tammi Terrell had died of a brain tumor the year before. He had stopped performing. He tried out for the Detroit Lions. He was a man lost inside his own life, unsure if he wanted to keep making music at all.
Then Frankie came home. And Marvin sat down and wrote this.
Berry Gordy at Motown refused to release it. Too political. Too heavy. Not what people wanted from a pop record. He called it the worst thing he’d ever heard.
Marvin released it anyway. It became one of the greatest albums ever recorded.
“War is not the answer,” he sang. “For only love can conquer hate.”
That was 1971. The fact that this song still feels current isn’t discouraging. It’s a reminder that the answer hasn’t changed either.
3. Where Is The Love? — Black Eyed Peas (2003)
will.i.am wrote this in his car, parked outside a studio, a year and a half after the towers fell. He had been sitting with the news, the retaliation, the racism, the way everyone was angry and nobody seemed to know where to point it.
He didn’t pick one issue and make it subtle. He named all of it. Racism. Terrorism. War. Kids failing. Communities eating themselves from the inside. Then he asked the simplest question imaginable.
Where is the love?
It hit number one in seventeen countries. Not because the song was clever. Because everyone recognized the question. Most people didn’t have an answer. But the question resonated with them all.
That’s how you know it was the right one to ask.
4. Everybody Wants To Rule The World — Tears For Fears (1985)
This one sounds like a celebration, but it isn’t.
Roland Orzabal wrote it as a warning about the human appetite for power and control. The Cold War was still running hot. The military-industrial complex was humming. And underneath all of it was this simple, ugly truth: everybody wants to be on top.
Not just nations. People. Institutions. Egos. Everybody wants dominance. And that desire, scaled up across enough people for enough time, produces the world we’re living in.
The world has a power problem. This song named it in 1985.
It still hasn’t been fixed.
5. This Is America — Childish Gambino (2018)
Donald Glover dropped this on a Saturday night in May 2018 with no warning. By Sunday morning, everyone was talking about it.
The music video became one of the most analyzed pieces of media in years. Gambino dances while chaos erupts behind him. Phones go up. People film everything. Violence happens. The beat changes. Life goes on.
That’s the mirror.
We’re the audience in the background, entertained while everything burns.
This is the sharpest cultural observation of the last decade. No other song on this playlist makes you this uncomfortable. That’s exactly why it’s here.
6. Waiting On The World To Change — John Mayer (2006)
People criticized this song for being passive. An excuse for a generation that watched and waited instead of acted.
Honestly, I think that misreads it.
John Mayer wasn’t celebrating passivity. He was documenting a feeling. The specific helplessness of watching the news and feeling like none of it responds to you. Of seeing the world move in the wrong direction and not knowing how to grab the wheel.
Most of us have been exactly there. Sitting on a couch, watching something awful happen on a screen, wanting to do something and having no idea what that something would even be.
Naming that feeling honestly is the first step out of it. You can’t fix what you won’t admit you’re feeling.
7. Pursuit Of Happiness — Kid Cudi (2009)
This song is darker than it sounds.
Cudi has been open about what this period of his life cost him. Depression, addiction, the particular exhaustion of chasing something that keeps moving just out of reach. He was also dealing with a specific loneliness — surrounded by people, isolated inside the fame, watching everyone around him chase things that made them miserable once they caught them.
The pursuit of happiness, done the wrong way, can take you apart from the inside.
He kept going anyway. And in persevering, he made something that told millions of people they weren’t alone in that pursuit.
This isn’t a pure feel-good song. It’s an honest one. And usually those are more meaningful.
8. The Middle — Jimmy Eat World (2001)
Jim Adkins wrote this watching insecure kids at shows stand in the exact center of the room, trying to be seen without committing to anything. He wanted to write something for them. Something for anyone stuck between where they were and where they were trying to go.
You’re probably in the middle of something right now.
A hard season. A transition. A question without an answer yet. Something you’re building that isn’t finished.
The middle always feels like this. That’s not a sign it’s going wrong. That’s just what the middle feels like.
9. We Didn’t Start The Fire — Billy Joel (1989)
Billy Joel wrote this after a 21-year-old told him history started with the Beatles.
He was 40 at the time.
So he sat down and listed every major world event from 1949 to 1989. Every war, every scandal, every cultural shift, every catastrophe. Three minutes and eighteen seconds of relentless history, fired off so fast you can barely keep up.
He didn’t start any of it. Neither did you. But you inherited all of it. Every generation inherits the fire from the one before.
The fire was already burning when he was born. It’ll be burning when we’re gone.
10. We Didn’t Start The Fire — Fall Out Boy (2023)
In 2023, Fall Out Boy picked up exactly where Joel left off.
Columbine. 9/11. Social media. COVID. School shootings. Climate change. Thirty-four years of events compressed into the same relentless structure Billy Joel built.
These two songs belong back to back. Joel said here’s everything that happened. Fall Out Boy says and then this happened. The form held. The content changed.
That’s not just a musical choice. It’s the message of the song playing out across decades. We didn’t start the fire. But now it’s landed in our hands.
11. Alright — Kendrick Lamar (2015)
This is the pivot point of the entire playlist.
Everything before this song is diagnosis. Everything after it is response.
Kendrick wrote “Alright” about police brutality, systemic racism, and the particular exhaustion of a community that keeps being told its pain isn’t real. He was also fighting his own battle at the time — struggling with suicidal thoughts and survivor’s guilt after friends were killed in Compton. The chant wasn’t a slogan he invented from a distance. It was something he was trying to convince himself of.
He rapped it over a Pharrell beat and somehow made a protest anthem sound like a hymn.
“We gon be alright.”
In 2015, those four words became a chant in the streets at rallies across the country. Not because the problems were solved. Because people needed something to hold onto while they kept fighting.
That’s what real hope sounds like. Not comfortable. Earned.
12. Man In The Mirror — Michael Jackson (1988)
Siedah Garrett wrote this song, not Jackson. She and Glen Ballard wrote it in one night. Jackson heard the demo and cried. He called Siedah at three in the morning. He wanted it as the closing track on Bad and he donated every dollar the single earned to charity.
The message is the oldest one in the book, and also the most ignored.
If you want to change the world, start with yourself. Not eventually. Now. Not after you’ve fixed everything else. First.
You cannot rearrange anything out there before you’ve looked honestly at what’s in here.
13. Love Yourz — J. Cole (2014)
“No such thing as a life that’s better than yours.”
In a genre built almost entirely on comparison, status, and proving you made it, J. Cole put out a song telling you your life, exactly as it is today, is enough.
No hook. No chorus. Just him talking directly to you over birdsong and rain.
Gratitude isn’t passive. It’s a discipline. And in a world that makes its money convincing you that you don’t have enough, choosing to appreciate what you have is one of the most radical things you can do.
14. Changes — 2Pac (1998)
Tupac recorded this in 1992, when he was 21 years old.
It samples Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is” — a song about systemic racism from a white artist a decade earlier. The sample wasn’t an accident. He was drawing a line from then to now.
The song wasn’t released until 1998, two years after he was killed.
He named systemic racism, drug cycles, poverty, and the structures that keep communities trapped with the clarity of someone who had lived inside them. He didn’t dress it up. He didn’t make it comfortable.
You can be grateful for your own life and still be honest about what the world looks like for other people. That’s not a contradiction. That’s what it means to actually pay attention.
15. Keep Ya Head Up — 2Pac (1993)
The same man who wrote Changes wrote this.
He dedicated it to Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old Black girl shot and killed by a store clerk in Los Angeles in 1991. The clerk received no jail time.
Tupac responded with a song about love, peace, and respect. For women especially. For communities that kept being told they didn’t matter.
Two songs. Two different temperatures. Same conviction.
That range is what made him extraordinary.
16. Price Tag — Jessie J ft. B.o.B. (2011)
B.o.B opens this song. He wrote his verse for the people going broke trying to look rich — the specific pressure to spend money you don’t have just to keep up appearances. He’d watched it happen to friends. He’d felt it himself.
Then Jessie J takes the chorus and says it even simpler: it’s not about the money.
They made a pop song that reached number one in multiple countries with a message most of us know and very few of us live like we know. We spend the majority of our lives chasing a number, a status, an image of success that was sold to us before we were old enough to question whether we wanted it.
The price tag was never the point.
17. Don’t Stop Believin’ — Journey (1981)
Jonathan Cain was broke, living in Hollywood, ready to walk away from music completely. He called his father looking for a reason to keep going.
His father said: Your blessing is right around the corner. Don’t stop believing.
Cain wrote that phrase in his notebook. Years later he brought it to Journey. Steve Perry happened to see the streetlights on Sunset Boulevard while they were writing, and “streetlights, people” went into the song.
They built one of the most recognizable songs in history around a phone call from a father to a son who was about to quit.
The song isn’t about making it. It’s about the phone call right before you quit.
When you’re on the verge of walking away, remember to give this one a listen.
18. Keep Your Head Up — Andy Grammer (2011)
When Andy Grammer wrote this, he was performing on the streets of Santa Monica. Singing on corners, passing around the hat, living in the gap between where he was and where he was trying to go.
He was literally living the message.
It’s unashamed optimism and it makes no apology for that. You’ve done the hard thinking. You’ve sat with the weight. Sometimes what you need next is someone to just say it’s going to be okay.
Because it is going to be okay.
19. The Show Goes On — Lupe Fiasco (2010)
Lupe built this track over a sample from Modest Mouse and dedicated it to everyone who was counted out.
At the time, his own record label didn’t believe in the album and refused to release it. They wanted something more commercial. Lupe fought them publicly and won.
The show went on.
For the kids who were told no. The people who didn’t have the connections or the resources or the right last name. The ones who kept showing up anyway because stopping wasn’t really an option.
The show always goes on.
20. Both Of Us — B.o.B ft. Taylor Swift (2012)
B.o.B wrote this for people who felt invisible. The ones grinding in silence, holding it together on the outside while barely keeping it together on the inside.
He’d been one of them. Sleeping on floors, working jobs that went nowhere, wondering if anyone could see how hard he was trying.
Taylor Swift came in on the chorus and turned it into something bigger — a reminder that whatever you’re carrying, someone else is carrying it too. Different life, different circumstances, but the same weights on their shoulders.
That’s not a slogan. It’s just true.
And sometimes knowing you’re not alone in it is enough to keep going for another day.
21. Imagine — John Lennon (1971)
Yoko Ono helped write this song. The structure came from her 1964 book Grapefruit, which was full of conceptual art pieces that started with the word “imagine.” John said later the song should have been credited to both of them. He gave her that credit quietly, after the fact.
Lennon recorded it in 1971 and it became the most performed peace anthem in history.
People call it naive. I think they’re afraid of it. Because it asks you to genuinely picture a world built differently from the ground up. No division used as a weapon. No greed dressed up as ambition. Just people, here, now, sharing this place.
That’s not naivety. That’s imagination. And without it, nothing ever gets built.
22. A Change Is Gonna Come — Sam Cooke (1964)
In October 1963, Sam Cooke was one of the most famous musicians in America.
He was turned away from a whites-only motel in Louisiana.
He went home and wrote about hope. But here’s what’s interesting: the song came from two places at once. The first was anger and humiliation at what happened in Louisiana. The second was hearing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” — a protest anthem by a white artist — and realizing he needed to write his own. He was inspired and frustrated at the same time.
He wrote deeply, painfully, honestly. Not the comfortable kind of hope. The kind that survives after you’ve seen what the world actually is.
He was killed in December 1964, just weeks after this song was released.
The song kept going.
That kind of hope doesn’t belong to one person. It passes forward. That’s what makes it real.
23. One Love / People Get Ready — Bob Marley (1977)
In 1978, Jamaica was in the grip of political violence. Two rival gangs, backed by two rival political parties, were killing each other in the streets.
Bob Marley organized the One Love Peace Concert and brought both political leaders on stage with him. He joined their hands above his head.
He did that with music.
One love. One heart. It sounds simple. Marley lived it as a structural belief. The idea that love could actually hold things together when everything else broke.
We could use more of that conviction right now.
24. Redemption Song — Bob Marley (1980)
His last studio album. Just Marley and an acoustic guitar.
He was dying when he recorded this. Marley was diagnosed with cancer in 1977. He knew his time was short. So the opening line — “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds” — isn’t abstract philosophy. It’s what a dying man chose to say with his remaining time.
That line comes from a 1937 speech by Marcus Garvey. Marley reached back across four decades to pull it forward.
Marley died of cancer in 1981, less than a year after recording this.
If you only take one thing from this entire playlist, take that line. The walls built inside your own mind are the ones that matter most. And only you can take them down.
25. Heal The World — Michael Jackson (1991)
Jackson said this was his favorite song he ever made.
He started the Heal the World Foundation the same year he released it. He performed it at the Super Bowl. He meant every word.
Make it a better place. For you and for me and the entire human race.
That’s not a lyric. That’s an assignment.
26. Up&Up — Coldplay (2015)
Watch the music video.
Images of a broken world and a healing one at the same time. People lifting each other. Small moments of beauty inside everything hard. The world, slowly, going up.
The song doesn’t promise perfection. It promises direction.
That’s all anyone can really offer.
27. Good Life — OneRepublic (2007)
You made it through.
Not to the finish line. There isn’t one. But to the part where you can look around and recognize something worth protecting.
Ryan Tedder wrote this after a stretch of touring that nearly broke him — sleeping on airport floors, missing his family, questioning whether any of it was worth it. Then he came home. He saw his friends. He realized the life he was so busy chasing was already happening around him.
Good friends. Good music. Good light through a window on a slow morning. Gratitude for the things we normally take for granted usually gives us the perspective we need to see that it’s not so bad.
When it comes down to it, the small things are everything.
28. What A Wonderful World — Louis Armstrong (1967)
Vietnam. Civil Rights. The country tearing at its own seams.
Louis Armstrong recorded this specifically because of the turmoil, not despite it. He wanted to remind people of what was still beautiful. The record label president, Larry Newton, hated it. He physically tried to stop the recording session. When it was finished, he refused to promote it in America.
It was a hit in England and largely ignored here. The song sat mostly unheard for twenty years.
Then it was used in Good Morning Vietnam in 1987. Then the whole world heard it.
Armstrong wasn’t in denial about what the world was. He knew exactly what it was. He was choosing to also name what else it was at the same time.
The trees. The sky. The faces of strangers. Babies who will grow up and figure things out.
“And I think to myself... what a wonderful world.”
That’s not optimism. That’s the highest form of awareness there is.
29. Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) — Baz Luhrmann (1999)
In 1997, a Chicago Tribune columnist named Mary Schmich wrote a hypothetical commencement speech and published it in her column.
Someone emailed it around the internet and attributed it to Kurt Vonnegut. It went viral before viral was a word. Vonnegut’s wife had to issue a statement saying he didn’t write it.
Australian film director Baz Luhrmann set it to music in 1999. He hired voiceover artist Lee Perry to recite the essay over a downtempo remix of Rozalla’s 1991 dance anthem “Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good).”
This is the end credits scene. A fever-dream of a track with unique origins. A voice giving you meaningful life advice over a synth track.
Wear sunscreen. Don’t worry so much. Stretch. Do things that scares you.
Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.
Then go be greater.
That’s the end :)
I hope you enjoyed this experience.
The world has problems. That’s not new. It’s had problems since before any of us got here and it’ll have problems after we’re gone. What changes is what each generation does with the world they inherit.
This playlist is what I believe the answer looks like. Not an exact plan. Not a perfect blueprint. But a direction and a desire to get there.
A little more love. A little more honesty. A little less noise.
Put this on during a long road trip. Share it with someone who needs it.
And when the mixtape ends, go do something with it.
Take the inspiration out into the real world.
Log off, spread love, be greater.
-[gf]
Mixtape Info:
Oldest song: A Change Is Gonna Come (1964)
Newest song: We Didn’t Start The Fire (2023)
Spans: 59 years of music (1964–2023)
Songs by decade:
1960s: 3 songs
1970s: 4 songs
1980s: 5 songs
1990s: 4 songs
2000s: 6 songs
2010s: 6 songs
2020s: 1 song