A Running Playlist
When I was younger, I would create a playlist of my favorite songs at the end of every year. The first year’s was Boston’s “More Than A Feeling,” though if you ask my parents, my first favorite song was probably “Runaround” by Blues Traveller, which they have always told me was the only thing to consistently stop me crying when I was an infant. I kept these year-in-reviews on my old Apple iPod classic, which has only recently retired after seven years of service to my music collection. I enjoyed going back through my ever-growing archive and figuring out songs that were important to me throughout the year.
I typically did this in the last week of December, when I was off from school for winter break and had nothing better to do than spend an afternoon contemplating my favorite songs I had heard that year at my parents’ computer. I believe it was towards the end of 2012 that I thought, “these seem to be a little biased towards whatever I’ve been listening to recently, aren’t they?” Songs I had obsessed over in January I might not listen to anymore by the time December rolled around. So I decided with 2013, I would try something different. Rather than assemble all the songs at the end of the year into one playlist, I would do this over the course of 2013, adding music to this playlist as I went through the year, and then organizing it however I saw fit at the year’s conclusion.
I never organized the playlist, which slowly over the course of the year morphed into a music diary from January to December. When 2014 arrived, I could remember much of the year through the 2013 playlist, pinpointing certain moments just by a song and the songs surrounding it, remembering the days that those got added to this list. While 2013 had only 89 songs, 2014 ballooned to 243, peaking at 315 songs in 2015. It’s turned into something I enjoy and a far more consistent if unorthodox method of keeping a journal, something I have tried to start often.
There’s a certain excitement in seeing how the playlist develops as the calendar year progresses, tracking its ups and downs, and in going back and revisiting previous years through music (Bob Dylan‘s “Desolation Row,” was added early November 2016, though Highway 61 Revisited as a whole was in frequent rotation around then). Earlier, on the highway home from work, I was listening to songs I remember putting on during 2017 — Father John Misty’s “I Love You Honeybear,” “Prologue” from Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, and “Disappeared Planets” by Richard Edwards to name a few. It had been a while since I had listened to any of those, and they all brought back moments from 2017. So what will 2018 hold? Well, so far it seems a combination of Chopin Nocturnes, Bill Evans, and the soundtracks to Phantom Thread and The Shape of Water.
But then again, it’s only January.
