Rock Around the Clock: 8 Songs About Very Specific Times of Day

Dear listeners,

On Friday, the R&B artist and former Fifth Harmony member Normani will finally release her debut album, “Dopamine” — a long (long) awaited, endlessly delayed release she has been teasing for nearly six years. Not that I’ve been watching the clock. Or at least I wasn’t until last month, when Normani dropped the album’s sultry lead single, “1:59.” That ode to not-quite-2-in-the-morning got me dreaming up a playlist of songs about incredibly specific times of day. Now that Normani is ready to share her opus with the world, so am I.

Plenty of songs celebrate the hour on the hour; Drake has an entire playlist’s worth of songs with titles like “6PM in New York” or “8AM in Charlotte.” But that’s not what I’m interested in here. With all due respect to Ariana Grande, I’m not even talking 6:30. I’m talking absurdly precise, random time stamps glimpsed on a digital clock or a lock screen and forever burned into one’s memory: “12:51,” “10:35,” “11:59.”

Luckily, there is no shortage of such songs, from artists as varied as Moby Grape, Tiësto and Elliott Smith. And weirdly enough, there exists a trio of unrelated songs that are named after three subsequent minutes in the middle of the 10 o’clock hour. Go figure! Naturally, I sequenced the track list in chronological order — like an incredibly abbreviated playlist version of Christian Marclay’s “The Clock.” It certainly won’t last you 24 hours, but it’ll take you on a temporal journey just the same.

All right, you know what time it is: Press play.

It’s 11:59 and I want to stay alive,

Lindsay

Listen along while you read.

1. The Strokes: “12:51”

We begin exactly 51 minutes after midnight, “the time my voice/Found the words I sought,” as Julian Casablancas specifies on this catchy leadoff single from the Strokes’ 2003 album “Room on Fire.” “12:51” is a mumbled tale of rekindled romance, the acquisition of malt liquor and other sordid things that happen after the clock strikes 12.

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