Money is fake, but Spotify playlists are forever.
I don’t love to journal. Therapists always recommend it, and I’ve tried for sure. But in my room are journals with a week’s worth of information on my life that will probably not be uncovered for another 50 years. However, I do have a very public journal that I’ve been keeping since I was 15. Those journals are my monthly Spotify playlists that I’ve made since February 2015.
During that time I knew exactly what I was doing based on the music that is in the first playlist. It is titled “//February ‘15”. (Don’t ask about the lines I have no idea why) Fifty Shades of Gray had just come out because the playlist had two songs from the album – Love Me Like You Do and Witchcraft. Listening to Reflection by Fifth Harmony feels like a memory hitting me while walking down the hallway in my high school stepping over backpacks and girls sleeping on the floor.
Go to “//April ‘15”. Happy With Me by HOLY CHILD, King Kunta by Kendrick Lamar, and The Wire by HAIM put me sitting in the library alone in that same high school thinking about transferring to another high school where I had friends and would be much happier. In “//October ‘17”, I am listening to Love/Paranoia by Tame Impala, Tyler, The Creator’s new album Flower Boy, and a lot of 80s music because I was still coming off of a Stranger Things obsession.
Once I got to college, I remember thinking I needed to switch things up a bit. I had been making monthly playlists in high school, but in college I was going to be a new person. My Spotify even needed a reinvention. I started doing playlists by the season.
The Mamma Mia 2 soundtrack on “FALL 18” takes me to bonding with people who I have now known for years for the first time over how great the Why Did It Have To Be Me? scene was. We talked about it for weeks in one of my first college classes.
In “WINTER 20”, almost all of Fine Line is on the playlist, and I remember listening to it for the first time. I added these songs to this playlist in the back seat of my friend’s car because we took a ride and listened to it all together. It was a freezing December night, and I was wearing my A24 sweatshirt I wore all the time that semester. There is also a lot of Tame Impala, since the boy I liked at the time liked Kevin Parker.
Stories like this go on and on, and it’s all just in public. They are laid out for everyone to see. I hold these playlists and these memories close, and I don’t look back often. But when I do, it’s emotional that my teenage years are all neatly put together based on what I was listening to.