On an episode of the podcast No Dumb Questions, Destin and Matt discussed how they compiled a playlist for each year. This allowed them to track changing moods and tastes as the years went by, and also to link songs to specific times in their lives.
The benefit of listening to these shows hosted by people with more life experience is that I can actually learn from them sooner than how they learned themselves. I loved the idea of having anchor points in songs on an annual playlist, so I made my own for 2019 and 2020.
I spent some time the other day trying to begin building out my 2021 playlist. I seeded it with about 5 songs that were late additions in 2020 to give Spotify something to work with.
After thirty minutes of going through songs, nothing stuck with me.
This situation is still unresolved. I’ve always had trouble intentionally finding music that suits my tastes. It’s unusual for more than a few songs from a given band to strike me as my kind of music, leaving me in a tough position. Despite that knowledge, I scoured internet forums looking for bands related to those I’d listened to the most during 2020, but still couldn’t get a song to grab me.
I’m not sure what to do better. Perhaps my relationship to music is just a bit complicated, and I need to let things settle, let the playlist formulate naturally. Maybe I just need to do more research. I am certain that I love this idea of a yearly playlist, and I’m not giving up on it. It worked pretty well in both 2019 and 2020, but I had old music that hadn’t been a part of any playlist to fall back on.
The music well is not dry. I know there is more out there for me, and I’ll keep hunting for it. Ignoring my struggles though, I highly recommend something similar for everyone. Maybe music isn’t your thing (it wasn’t mine until I started working full time), but I’m sure there are other things you consume that could be put in a yearly list of some type. Track new meals, new books, places you visit1 or media you watch. Being intentional about tracking your life is putting an investment in your future. Memories are important, and setting up a system to enhance them isn’t something you’ll regret. At worst, a failed system may be something memorable itself.
- You probably shouldn’t do that this year. ↩