When I was little, my parents introduced me to bands like the Beatles, the Eagles, the old Maroon 5, and countless others. Since then, music has remained a massive and wholesome presence in my life. I grew up listening to a collection of classic bands that everyone knew. These artists would rapidly become a gateway for me to discover that music extended far beyond the songs that played on the radio.
As I grew older, my appreciation and passion for music intensified and began to play a bigger role in my daily existence. Each part of my day had a soundtrack. Over time, I fashioned an extensive inventory of playlists for both myself and my friends and dipped my foot into a wide variety of genres. The songs I liked varied in both popularity and decade. Expectedly, my music taste changed with age, but would even fluctuate drastically in mere months.
I wondered why this was.
There was a time when I believed there was a playlist for each stage of my—and perhaps everyone’s—life. For me, these stages seemed to last around two or three months. In the fall of 2019, I had recently had my heart broken. I recall sitting in my room with my best friend until 5 AM, my Altec speaker blasting the same five Tame Impala songs on repeat. Around mid-spring of 2020, I was consumed with my lack of direction, mad at the world and neck deep in angsty punk bands like AJJ, the Front Bottoms and Sorority Noise. The start of last summer brought slews of indie rock (Cage the Elephant and Rex Orange County were my late-night balcony jams) paired with an amalgamation of depthless party songs. I was getting over the past, having fun, unconcerned with romance and beginning to find myself again. With the end of summer came Hippie Sabotage and the appeal of my special country playlist—I had just entered a new relationship and we were drunk on love.
Always having been an avid music-lover and a deep thinker, I began to contemplate the way that music truly fits into my world. On a Friday night about a month ago, my boyfriend and I were sitting on the edge of his bed. He had just shown me a song he liked. I turned to him and asked, “Do you ever listen to a song and pretend you’re someone else, just to hear it like they would?”
What he didn’t know was that over the years, I’d asked many people this same question. They had all looked at me quizzically, as if the question itself was something they found hard to process. But without skipping a beat, my boyfriend said, “Yes.” He went on to tell me about a song he’d shown me before, “Every Time You Leave” by I Prevail. He said that for some reason, the song always comes on at least once during his drives to and from work (he works a dangerous and at times life-threatening job). He told me that when he hears that song, he thinks of how I feel when he leaves for work early every morning knowing he might not come back home.
Then, as we continued to talk about the complexities of music, he gestured to the juxtaposition between the emotion portrayed in the song and a lyric in the refrain that said, “Words don’t do it justice.”
And that, I realized, might be how music fits into all of our lives. It strives to describe a feeling in three or so minutes; to express a sentiment or story that you or someone you know feels the brunt of but never had the words to explain. An artist’s acknowledgement of the feeling that we’ve had inside us and never had the means to release makes us feel like we are sharing its weight. Like we are less alone. It is an affirmation; it makes our inner toil feel more universal. The music we listen to is less tailored to the season and more to the parts of us—however small, sad, victimized, furious, lovestruck, or elated—that are in need of company.