A soundtrack for thinking
Freethought Music
A curated collection of songs and playlists connected to the freethought tradition, with a background player that follows you across the site so the music never stops when you navigate to the next piece.
Songs
12 hand-picked tracks with lyrics that reflect freethought, humanist, and rationalist ideas. Click play on any song to hear just that track; it follows you across the site.
Browse collectionsPlaylists
3 background playlists grouped by mood, era, or theme. Hit play on one and keep reading; the track advances automatically.
How the player works
Click play on a song or playlist
A compact bar appears at the bottom of the screen with play/pause, skip, volume, and the current track name. That’s your persistent player.
Read anywhere on the site
Navigate to an article, the library, a reader tool, anywhere. The music keeps going without re-buffering. We store track and time in your browser so it can resume across reloads.
Stop whenever
The close button on the player bar stops playback and clears its state. The bar also hides itself on pages where audio would interrupt your reading flow.
Privacy. The player uses YouTube’s IFrame API under the hood. Once you press play, YouTube sees the video request and may set its own cookies for the session. We do not store anything beyond the current track + timestamp in your browser’s local storage. Nothing is sent to us. Full detail in our privacy policy.
Why YouTube? Licensing for streaming music on an independent publication is otherwise prohibitive. YouTube’s IFrame API is free, has the broadest catalogue, and keeps royalties flowing to the artists we feature. The trade-off is the cookie behavior above, which we disclose transparently.
Submit a song or playlist
We add songs and playlists on merit. If you know a track whose lyrics reflect freethought, humanist, or rationalist ideas, or a playlist curated for the same spirit, tell us.