Weedsday Playlist: Journalist Of The Year Nominee David Downs Shares 5 Songs For Your Next Smoke Sesh

On the cannabis beat for 15 years, journalist David Downs smokes more than 400 strains a year as the Senior Editor of Leafly. His popular column Leafly Buzz highlights the next Cup-winning strains before judges have even tried them. The co-author of the best-selling Marijuana Harvest with pioneering horticulturalist Ed Rosenthal, Downs is also a former music and tech writer with clips in Wired, Rolling Stone, The Onion and the New York Times.

“My mantra is: Serve the audience; and stay close to the plant,” Downs explains. And everything else has taken care of itself.”

In 2024, Downs re-energized San Francisco cannabis culture with the hit SF Weed Week, and SF Hash Week festivals. Up next—“Terpnami: SF Seed Fest” December 7-8. For more information, visit terpnami.com, and read on to find out how to RSVP.

Songs That’ll Gas You Up

David Downs running a panel at SF Weed Week. Courtesy of David Downs.

Who Is David Downs, Award-Winning Journalist And Bestselling Author?

Downs grew up a skater kid in Southern California where his mom owned a skateboard shop. His first concert was Sublime in Victorville, CA. He started writing in high school and freelanced in college, where he got an English Literature degree from the University of California-Santa Barbara. Downs’s first big break was as a fact-checker at Wired magazine in 2004. Music and tech writing highlights include interviewing MF Doom for Rolling Stone, and the founders of Google for Wired.

The journalist helped professionalize the cannabis beat beginning in 2009 with his ‘Legalization Nation’ column for the East Bay Express—where some of his work is captured in the documentary American Pot Story. Downs founded GreenState at San Francisco Chronicle in 2016.

By day, he leads a Leafly team adding more than 1,000 strains, and more than 250 stories per year to Leafly.

By night, he’s the creative animus behind the ‘Get to the Bag’ mylar art show, his own David Downs Reporter’s NoteBag, and three new Bay Area cannabis festivals.

“The next level of storytelling for me is crafting these experiences,” Downs states. “My new goal is to win the first Pulitzer Prize for cannabis criticism.”

David Downs’ Weedsday Playlist to Fuel Your Creative Fires

For his Weedsday Playlist, the father, husband, gamer, surfer, reader, skater, smoker, and music lover based in San Francisco for 20 years shares some of the 2024 music that fuels his creative fires.

“Having two young kids, I’m often tired,” Downs says. “But you just have to do it tired. Music is a form of fuel. It can give you that extra push to make your dreams real.”

Justice With Thundercat - "The End"

Our seed fest Terpnami has this retro sci-fi / electro / lazerwave theme. This 2024 track to close Justice’s new EDM album captures that vibe for me. It’s pure energy, with operatic synths, and the inclusion of Thundercat is always a win. Cannabis genetics and growing has never been more technologically advanced—with meristem tissue culture, genotyping, chemotyping, Big Data-driven phenohunts—all in service of new terps and effects. Here’s the full Terpnami Playlist so far. RSVP here. We’re gonna have a seed rave in a big warehouse!

Click here to play on Spotify!

Larry June - "Morning Calculations"

San Francisco rapper Larry June is my North Star in terms of rap vibe, production, and focusing on personal development and not beefing. You gotta ‘start a corporation / bet on yourself every time / put ‘em on payroll / make sure the taxes right.’ His 2023 album with The Alchemist, The Great Escape, was the theme for SF Weed Week. The Bay remains untouchable.

Click here to play on Spotify!

*Editor's Note: Did you know? Nickia Delaware, Chief Creative Officer of Tokeativity, chose Larry June's "Feeling Good Today" for her Weedsday Playlist. Check out the full list here.

Mannequin Pussy - "Loud Bark"

Shoutout the 90s kids who grew up on Grunge, Punk, and total irreverence for sacred cows. Mannequin Pussy’s 2024 album I Got Heaven has that quiet-quiet-loud Pixies distortion and screaming you can put right into my veins.

Click here to play on Spotify!

Dehd - "So Good"

My happy place? Charging backside down the line at a private, point-break right at Kilometer 55 in Baja Mexico between Rosarito and Ensenada. You shoot over the black razor-sharp reef, over big pink starfish, and purple anemones. The blue sky and white clouds reflect off the dark glassy water. It’s as close as I’ll get to being Kit Cloudkicker from Tailspin. Dehd’s a top garage rock/surf rock act for a few years now and I’m juiced to see them in November in The City. Let’s go surfing!

Click here to play on Spotify!

Machinedrum Featuring Tanerelle - "KILL_U"

One more from 2024—because you gotta keep your ears open to new experiences. Super-delicious and intimate guitar and vocals from Tanerelle contrast with a glitchy thumping chorus in this 2024 song about perseverance. ‘They’ll want your peace / but it doesn’t kill you’ Machinedrum is in that Ninja Tune / Planet Mu wheelhouse of experimental EDM. As a gamer, I love all that glitchy stuff, and Machinedrum's album “3FOR82” really delivers. My Playstation Network gamertag is just “d2d”, because I slept on the sidewalk in SOMA for two nights to get one of the first PS3’s that came out.

Click here to play on Spotify!

And that's 5 for Weedsday. Check out my full playlist of 2024 music I’m trying out on Spotify under the alter-ego DJ DayDose. (‘Dedos’ means ‘fingers’ and ‘D2’ in Spanish—as in ‘DD’, my initials.)

See you in SF in December at Terpnami. Keep growing!

What are your favorite Weedsday tracks? Tell us about them - reach out at @honeysucklemagazine on Instagram!