What Makes a Truly Great Playlist?
Like a great album, a truly great playlist has a clear vision and storytelling principles underpinning it. But why, and how do you bring them to your own playlists?
Straight to the point, what makes a great playlist is the same thing that makes an album an absolute belter: storytelling. It isn’t just about having all killer, no filler. Killer tracks are important, but they aren’t the one key thing you need. What you need is storytelling.
That doesn’t mean you need to create a concept album or opera just to craft an unskippable album or playlist. Oasis’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? doesn’t tell one cohesive story lyrically, it does so through tone, structure, and emotion. When each song starts, you know it’s Oasis playing. You can ride the vibe of the album, listen to it like one DJ’s tailormade set, feeling that each song flows into or complements the next and the ones that came before it. Crucially, the album rises and falls, taking you on a ride that lets you know what it’s like to truly live like a rock ’n’ roll star.
Meanwhile, Green Day’s American Idiot tells a full story of disaffected youth coalescing around the central figure of “St Jimmy” in a post-9/11 US. But while it mostly succeeds in telling its narrative through fist-pumping anthems and tender ballads, its follow-up, 21st Century Breakdown, stumbles under its own weight. Bloated, at times unclear in its narrative arc, it contains plenty of songs throughout its 18-track run that you’d happily skip.
Both of these Green Day albums told stories lyrically as well as thematically and musically, but only American Idiot can be considered a masterclass on what makes a great album. Again, the album takes you on highs and lows, sometimes even within a lone ten-minute operatic treatise on rebellion like ‘Jesus of Suburbia’. But there’s enough depth to engage you, enough passion to excite you, enough pace to arrest you. Sure, there are the key standout tracks like ‘American Idiot,’ ‘Holiday,’ and ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends,’ but listening to the rest of the album is far from a chore.
So what do both American Idiot and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? have in common? A cohesive and compelling story.
Like the best films, they aren’t simply a non-stop thrill-ride. They set the scene, introduce characters or emotions, build up the world that you’re about to enter, and then revel in it for the next 40(ish) minutes before depositing you on the other side with a feeling you didn’t have before; be it excitement, sadness, joy, pain, or even catharsis. Like the best stories, they take time to get you invested in the scene, story or world before hitting you with that high-octane car chase (‘Holiday’) or a poignant and tender moment between the two main characters (‘Wonderwall’).
It’s not just the sentiment and construction of these songs that makes them work so well, though that certainly helps when they’re released as singles. In the album format, it’s their placement in the running order that’s key, and the vibe of the songs around them. ‘Wonderwall’ is followed by ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger,’ striking a tone that is similarly romantic but altogether different from ‘Wonderwall.’ Instead of poignant regret in the latter — “Today was gonna be the day but they’re never gonna throw it back to you” — you get a sense of defiance and possible acceptance in ‘Don’t Look Back’ — “You ain’t ever gonna burn my heart out.”. But that’s just two belters side-by-side; the entire album is full of connections, more musical and semantic than lyrical, and each song feels like a part of a larger whole. ‘Hello’ slides into ‘Roll with It’ and ‘Cast No Shadow’ is complemented by the Beatlesque ‘She’s Electric.’
Forging connections between songs on a thematic footing is clearly vital to bringing together a proper album, and the same is true of a great playlist.
A hodgepodge of your favourite tracks slapped together in a playlist that could span hours will fail to give you any sense of cohesion or deepen your knowledge of the music you’re listening to. You’ll just hit shuffle play and be done with it — and I guarantee you won’t finish the playlist either. More likely, you’ll skip songs to get to your favourite favourites and your Spotify Wrapped will stay the same year after year after year.
So, here are my rules for making a great playlist:
Theme
Give your playlist a core narrative or thematic focus
I believe a great playlist should centre on one core theme. Some songs may be fantastic, but if they don’t fit with all the others in your playlist and their central theme, they’ll jar too heavily no matter how much you try to make them stick. That isn’t to say that every song must come from the same genre; far from it. You could hop from rock to grime to jazz to indie or dance, but what’s key is the vibe and whether it feels right.
Earlier this year, after watching Netflix’s Hip-Hop Evolution, I became obsessed with the history of hip-hop and rap music for a good few months. I didn’t listen to much else. So it wasn’t long before I’d made a couple of playlists inspired by the show. Graphic Displays is one. I gave myself a simple core theme of the Golden Age of hip-hop and then vibed my way to what felt right as a playlist. Lyrically, there’s no cohesive story here, but taken as a whole the playlist is a story of a key time in the history of hip-hop — and that’s what brings it together and makes it engaging to listen to.
Similarly, I recently watched Paul Simon’s Central Park performance from 1991, Concert in the Park. Seeing such a wide body of influence brought to bear onstage encouraged me to seek out wider genres and try to bring them together under one banner, for one cohesive playlist that felt right from start to finish. My theme was Concert in the Park, but that simply acted as my starting point. The result was What You Like, a melting pot of genres and artists including Gabriels, Billy Nomates, Michael Kiwanuka, Ibibio Sound Machine, Matt Berry, Sons of Kemet, and Paul Simon.
An idea can bind seemingly disparate songs or genres together.
Story Arc & Tempo
Tell a story with track order & keep up momentum with tempo
No artist ever puts together a collection of work without considering where and how the work is placed. With paintings in a gallery, the order as well as the space and lighting will have an effect on how you feel about a piece. Likewise with music. Placing “She’s Electric” at the start of Morning Glory evokes a completely different sentiment to the actual opening track, “Hello,” which feels like an introduction to the album and sets the stage for the next 50 minutes.
I’m not saying you have to make sure your chosen songs’ lyrics explicitly tell a story, or that they need to have some hidden message. The music itself could be the story. But that begs the question, how do you build a story from anything?
It’s simple: Action. The traditional story arc structure lends itself to any piece of theatre, film, writing, or even music. There are five key stages to this arc: Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, and Resolution. Here’s how they work along with how they would work in a playlist:
Exposition: Set the scene and the stakes of your world/story — the rules of or idea behind your playlist
Rising Action: Introduce a problem that raises those stakes and moves the character along — or up the tempo and get your listener moving
Climax: Bring things to a head when the character confronts the problem — or you hit the listener with a truly undeniable belter that you’ve built towards
Falling Action: Engage with the fallout of that confrontation — or give your listener a breather
Resolution: And finally provide a sense of closure or finale — or rise to your playlist’s finale/provide a cathartic ending
These aren’t cast-iron stages or a tick box exercise for a great playlist. As with any story, they bleed into one another, and they can repeat as you have multiple stages of Rising Action, building towards a show-stopping song. But following this type of arc in your playlist will reward commitment from listeners and keep them engaged throughout because it gives them payoff.
For me, lyrics often play second fiddle to the music when it comes to track order. I’ll say it again: a great way to build an irresistible playlist is to make connections.
Does the drumming in this song work well as a segue into the next song? Does the key change work? Does this artist’s vocals contrast nicely with the next artist’s?
Morning Glory does all of these things and works well within the traditional story arc. ‘Hello’ sets the scene and rules of the album. ‘Roll with It’ then raises the stakes and makes you feel like you’re living the rockstar life. The one-two of ‘Wonderwall’ and ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ acts as just one Climax in the first half of the album, with ‘Hey Now’ and ‘Untitled (The Swamp Song Excerpt #1)’ acting in this instance not as Falling Action but more Rising Action. This continues until the second Climax of ‘Morning Glory’ followed by the Falling Action of ‘Untitled (The Swamp Song Excerpt #1)’ and then the Resolution of ‘Champagne Supernova.’ And the whole album flows from one song to the next.
Above all, tempo can make or break your track order and therefore your playlist. Think about it: How many times has a weird juxtaposition between songs in shuffle play left you racing for the skip button? Too many times, right?
Ordering your tracks just right to embed key storytelling features into your playlist will avoid this pitfall, allowing each song to bleed into the next or contrast against it in a satisfying way. And you can do this via the music itself, placing a ballad after three anthems, or a jazz interlude between two floorfillers, or you can do it lyrically. Hell, you can do both if you want.
Quality Over Quantity
Don’t make your playlist too long — or too short
Length also plays a vital role. There’s a reason, after all, that few great albums go beyond the 70-minute mark — and it’s not just because of how much space artists had to play with on a vinyl. In fact, the reason is twofold: one, people tend to get bored easily; and two, quality, not quantity, is everything.
First up, let’s look at boredom. We all get bored, we can’t help it. Some studies suggest we can only concentrate on one thing for up to 20 minutes before our minds wander. This is a worrying fact of life for teachers and business execs, but film execs seem not to have got the memo. We now live in a cinematic age where three-hour films have become a worrying norm.
But, strangely, not all epic films are complete bore-fests. Some give audiences a damn good reason to stick around. They’re paced well and offer audiences satisfying payoffs regularly throughout their runtime.
And this has lessons for the playlist maker, because, ultimately, what you’re asking listeners for is commitment. You’re asking listeners to stick around and even come back to your playlist.
This is regardless of whether listeners are actively listening or simply using your playlist for background noise. Someone may not be actively listening to your playlist, but their brain will be, and if they don’t vibe with the playlist, they’ll know, and they’ll turn it off — fast! You need to reward commitment to keep people listening, and that’s where depth (theme) and pacing (story/tempo) come in.
But they’re not everything. Artists could pump out hours of new music every two years for their fans — especially in the digital era — but they choose not to because quality is what matters most. Marrying the quality of songs alongside pacing and thematic focus is where every great playlist starts, but you also need to identify where and when the end should come.
Personally, I find playlists of around an hour long best, but some other mixtape makers opt for just eight songs per playlist. The true test is not how long the playlist is, but how long it feels to listen to it and whether you want to listen to it again. Belters I’ve made like Last One Out, Get the Lights saw me rinse just nine songs again and again because they didn’t feel as long as they were, and because the quality of the songs got me excited to listen to them again.
Enough with the Theory…
There you have it, what makes a truly great playlist is just three key elements: Theme, Story/Tempo, and Quality Over Quantity.
In other words, to build a great playlist you must have a clear focus delivered through cracking songs, rising action across and between songs, and never outstay your welcome. Basically, all the things that make fantastic albums.
Why not give it a go yourself? I sure have, once or twice. Here are some of my favourite playlists I’ve created over the past few years. And like any album, they all deserved a cool name to go with them. Enjoy!
