If the music I like consisted not of sounds but of images, this is what it would look like. (All photos are from my own photography archives.)
I’ve been an organizer since my sandbox days. Once I’m into a thing, optimizing its ergonomics lights me up and compels me to act with purpose. As a preschooler, legend has it, I preferred rearranging boring grown-up books by topic and format to playing make-believe. I’ve written before about my hacks for storing spices, files, gifts, recipes, leafy greens, and the words that come to me in my dreams. In the final weeks of 2022 my attention has been on the music that I’ve been discovering through Spotify. How to harness its energy, how to attract more of what moves me, and how to structure the way I catalog my favorite songs for maximum fun and functionality.
The playlists I’ve created and their contents are and will be in flux—evolving along with my tastes and with what artists record as the future unfolds. But transience does not negate the value of capturing a moment: it’s what imbues the snapshot with significance.
Someone recently told me that the songs I like all seem to embody a sense of standing apart and observing reality from a distant place. That may be a more useful definition than one based on genre, considering how rarely it’s whole albums or styles I find satisfying.
If you want to listen to some of the music I listen to, you’ll find me on Spotify by looking up my last name. And if you have any insights into how to define what I like, let me know. (In fact, this is the diagnosis I’m most curious about out of all the possible ones, past and present.)
I won’t list artists or songs now. And I won’t offer any further opinions. Instead, I’m inviting you to browse through the names, cover images, and short descriptions of my Spotify playlists. It’s all mine—the photos and the words. I like the way they click into place—as album covers, as invitations, as metaphors for certain qualities of mood, energy, or meaning. And I don’t think these words and pictures get nearly enough play on Spotify, which is a far cry from a social network (as it should be, because it’s one hell of a music academy).
Twenty twenty-two was heavy with grief, stupefying with meaning, and bright with excitement. I could be writing subtly about the losses today or thoughtfully about the lessons, but I’m going with splashes of color in service of heart-opening sound. And with the words I’ve chosen to touch what is resonating.
Three thoughts deserve a postscript. One—the person who made the observation about my music having a distant quality was my mother. (She also said that listening to my playlists makes her feel young, but just about everything makes my mother feel young.) Two—I am satisfied that I found a way to slip the word stupefy into a post about Spotify, even though I managed no such feats in the title. And three—if you’re wondering about that Eno in all the playlist names, it’s just a riff on my initials, no relation to other possible persons and things.