As a kid, I loved making mix tapes. The only problem was that I didn’t listen to a lot of different music. One time, when I was eleven, I tried to make a mix tape to listen to while I read a SPAWN trade paperback. I wanted to order the songs so that they matched the narrative of the book. I only owned four albums at the time, though, so all the songs on the mixtape came either from Smash Mouth’s “Fush Yu Mang,” The Offspring’s “Americana” the “Spawn” soundtrack (of course), or an album I had that featured haunting piano music accompanied by wolf howls.
As my music collection grew (thanks early ‘00s online music piracy!), I continued to sit on the carpeted floor of my bedroom, hunched over my stereo, and recorded songs from my CD and MP3 collection onto cassette tapes and then blank CDs and, eventually, MiniDiscs.
In high school, I would walk around my neighborhood for hours at a time, listening to compilations I had made for myself to listen to. After I switched from my Walkman to a Discman, I had to learn how to hold the player just right against my leg so that the disc wouldn’t skip as I trod over uneven asphalt.
The first iPod was released during my sophomore year of college and it was a revelation. You could put MP3s - a seemingly unlimited number of them - on a small device and carry it with you wherever you went. Empowered by access to my college dorm’s file-sharing network, my new iPod and I were inseparable. I listened to music non-stop and my knowledge of music expanded far beyond what was playing on Alt Rock radio and Total Request Live. I started listening to records that came out years before I was born and songs that were released in my childhood but that I had ignored in favor of whatever the local radio station was shoving down my ear canals. That said, I was never very good at being on the cutting edge of cool music - my threshold for discovering new bands was always a year or two after they had gotten their write-up in Pitchfork.
The gift of unlimited music, though, meant that curation fell by the wayside. Now, untethered from the need to create 60-minute compilations, my playlists expanded to gargantuan proportions. By the time I got my 150 GB iPod, I was spending just as much time clicking through songs on the playlists I made - in search of something I actually wanted to listen to - as I spent actually listening to music. Streaming just made things worse.
I currently use Spotify for most of my music-listening needs. I have a playlist I started a few years ago - meant for the afternoon walks I started taking during COVID - called “Best of the Best.” As of today, that playlist is 4,157 songs deep - 275 hours and 35 minutes long. Best of the Best? Yeah, right.
I miss the fun of curating small, thoughtful collections of music. I miss the work that goes into selecting song order - always chasing that perfect experience when a song’s end perfectly dovetails into the next song’s meaning. I miss trying to form an overarching narrative out of disparate artists’ individual expressions. I miss playlists.
I am going to attempt a project this year. We’ll see how long it lasts but every month I’m going to create a ten-song playlist to share with somebody close to me. This first playlist is for my girlfriend Lucía, but, with her permission, I’m going to post it here in the newsletter:
One down, eleven more to go.