I first made my Spotify account in 6th grade with a cringey username and questionable music taste. My first playlist was called “Hi I guess…”, and it encompassed basically any pop song that was on the radio in the early 2010s. Halfway through high school however, I tried to organize my music by creating a few more playlists that encompassed certain genres. The playlists still had incoherent playlist titles and the covers were just pictures of random objects in my house. It was during quarantine — when I was listening nonstop to Spotify — that I began to look at other people’s profiles and learn how to create themed playlists. After discovering the folder feature on Spotify, I created 8 folders called “Artists,” “Media,” “Personal,” “Travels,” “Friends,” “Shared,” “4 Me,” and “Concerts” which each have different aesthetics and patterns.
My “Media” folder, with 28 playlists, is my favorite out of all of them. This is where I create playlists which recreate the narrative of characters from shows, novels, and films that I really enjoy or encompass the soundtracks from. The pattern in this folder is that each row of four playlists has a different aesthetic. For example, my first row follows Marvel characters and each playlist cover is a vintage comic book cover of them. The titles and descriptions for every playlist are infamous quotes that the character says in their story. I actually first created this folder for a project in one of my classes here at Davis. For ENL 023, Shakespeare in Pop Culture, I decided to make a playlist which followed Ophelia’s journey in Hamlet. I used songs to demonstrate how Ophelia’s relationships with her boyfriend, brother, and father all led to her immense grief and eventual psychosis. However, I ended the playlist with a more positive tone that reimagined the tale for Ophelia having a supportive community that allowed her to feel and learn from her emotions. Some of the prominent artists in this playlist are Rosalía, Arlo Parks, Liana Flores, and Billie Eilish. There were many songs regarding flowers to reference Ophelia’s scene in Hamlet where she distributes flowers to the court, but most songs regarded heartbreak, grief, and healing.
After this project, I went on to make playlists for characters in my favorite fandoms. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not very good in the visual arts, but I’d say making playlists provides the same calm and catharsis to me that doodling does for artists. Searching for songs that relate to a character’s mindset and organizing them to match their narrative or create a flow allows me to look more deeply into a work. It’s both like writing a story and an essay on your favorite characters, which, as a Comparative Literature major, is really fun! If you need a new pastime, enjoy listening to music, or are really obsessed with a fandom, I highly recommend creating themed playlists on Spotify.