Playlists are souvenirs for the places I’ve been.

The art of a vagabond playlist

You know how certain songs will always remind you of a particular place or time in your life? I like to create playlists each time that I move to a new home. Mostly I use these while running, but over time, they’ve become remarkable souvenirs that can help me relive different moments and places in my life. I move frequently, and I’ve found that these lists have served as part souvenir, part diary and part home-sick therapy session. When I look back on my playlists for Brooklyn, Berlin, Bavaria and Texas I can see that the songs represent so much more than the place of their namesake.

In a way, my playlists are like journals. They’re always there to remind me about what I was experiencing, feeling, and doing at different times in my life.

After leaving NYC to move to Berlin, there were times where I felt overwhelmed, and missed Brooklyn, missed America, and missed the English language. I was experiencing a variety of emotions. I was feeling proud to live in a foreign country for the first time in my life. I was homesick for New York City, where everything and everyone felt familiar.

And so my Berlin playlist helped to put my brain exactly where it needed to be. There are songs to remind me of my coworkers in Manhattan, songs that I identify with runs through Brooklyn and songs I discovered after moving to Germany, feeling proud and excited about this new life adventure. My early Berlin running playlists say as much about my experience in NYC as they do about Berlin. The collection as a whole allows me to relive the early emotional moments as an expat, accomplished by simply pushing “play”.

Over time, I began settling into my new German habitat and things began to feel more comfortable. And so the playlists created months into my Berlin experience reflect less nostalgia for what I was missing, and more excitement for what I was living.

And then I moved again. This time, to the other side of Germany, to a remote farming village at the foot of the alps. Everything that I had come to love about city life and Berlin was now gone, and I had to adjust to life in a village with a population of less than 100 people. New challenges, worries and fears. And so my Bavarian playlist served to remind me of easier days in Berlin. Until of course, I fell in love with Bavaria, and started creating playlists to accompany my epic mountain runs.

And then came a move back to America. Everything that I thought I missed about the USA became tired in an instant, and I constantly crave European life again. A vagabond is never settled. Playlists have since proven to be wonderful escapes back to the places I’ve lived — even when I’m not traveling.

I’m convinced that the right playlist can get you through a move to just about anywhere in the world — even the places you don’t want to visit. As proof, I moved to Texas.

There’s a playlist for that — songs that remind me of non-Texas things, and life in places where fewer people carry guns and the air isn’t always a sweaty 100 degrees. I have playlists for the places moved since — Vermont, Connecticut and others are in the works. So while my run this morning might have taken place along the streets of a New England harbour town, my head and heart where traversing bridges and cobblestone sidewalks. In Berlin. Are you in-between trips? Or saving up for the next vagabond adventure? You can be wherever you want to be. You just have to push “play”.