Iāve always loved music. As a little girl, I could spend hours going through peoples CD collections, sampling them with my little battery-operated CD player. If you showed me a stack, rack or box of CDs, I was in heaven.
When I was 8 (2011), I got my first iPod for Christmas, an iPod Touch with 32GB of memory! The sticker said it was from Santa, but āStepā got a package in the mail from Apple three weeks earlier, so I knew who it was really from. Upon opening it, I rushed upstairs to my older brotherās computer, plugged it in, carefully copied the username and password for the family iTunes account (from a wrinkled post-it note), and the world was never the same.
It never occurred to me that my parents could see all of my playlists and that they were automatically downloaded to their devices - like my break-up playlist, inspired by Antoine, my French-boy fifth grade crush. It didnāt work out because he didnāt have an email account and our recess times didnāt line up, but my playlist helped me through it.
I could burn playlists to CDs and exchange them with friends - or gift them to middle school boys who I hoped to amaze with my awesome musical tastes. Thereās an art to the playlist that involves controlling pace and mood - every playlist was both a gift and a seduction.
Today we have Spotify with its unlimited streaming of every song ever made - on demand. Exchanging playlists, these days, is as easy as pressing "Share" and typing the first few letters of a friendās or lover's username.
Like most of my girlfriends, I consider myself a playlist queen and as I continue to work this career path Iāve chosen, regardless of what's weighing me down, I know I can turn to my playlists to push me through. The band āThe Narcissist Cookbook ā assures me that my shocking honesty is fun with āBroken People.ā āK. Flayā allows me to dance-out my rage with āBlood in the cutā and āNew Moveā motivates me to keep-at-it with āWhen did we stop.ā
Iāve countless Spotify playlists: one for waking up, one for writing papers, one for doing problem sets, others for walking to class, doing the laundry, for nostalgic reflection, and for embracing the astounding depth of human pain.
Of course, as time passes, I find new favorite songs and older playlists are replaced with updated ones; but thanks to the archival nature of Spotify playlist collections, all my old lists remain intact. Iāve never deleted one. Search my archives and youād see playlists from my freshie year, when I was new here, feeling insecure and alone, or from my sophomore year when I first fell in love.
This piece is a playlist love story, about how music reflects our identities and allows us to share ourselves through the vibes, melodies and beats that move us. I think playlists have a lot in common with poetry, which uses words, phrases, metaphors and imagery for similar purposes.