Sonic Timelines

The virtues of the mega-playlist

I’ve been slowly adding to a playlist of songs since 2012; the list as of press time sits at 1,264 songs, representing more than 91 hours of music. The playlist, affectionally known as “Real Slappers,” represents my entire musical journey since 2012.

I initially created the playlist to mirror the iTunes Library function, before Spotify debuted the “Liked Songs” functionality, but have kept it rolling even since. Although I clean up the playlist periodically, and sometimes will go through large purges (R.I.P. to the songs lost in the great country music massacre of mid-2013), I generally have left the playlist grow organically along with my tastes and discoveries.

The amount of change contained within this playlist, both in terms of my personal life and the technology in it, is humbling. When I started this playlist, I couldn’t drive and didn’t have a smartphone. I listened to Spotify mostly on my family’s desktop computer or an iPod Touch.

Eventually, I started sharing a car with my sister, but it didn’t have a way to play music from my phone through the car speakers; instead, throughout high school and into college I would boom tunes through a Bluetooth speaker while driving. I have fond memories of driving back and forth from college listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History through the Big Jambox. Eventually, I got a car with Bluetooth and now that is where much of my music consumption occurs, alongside my work computer.  

As the technologies evolved, so did the places where I listened. I moved from Greensboro, to Charlottesville, to Boulder; I spent time in Tanzania, Spain, Italy, Thailand, India, Dubai, throughout the United States, and many more places unnamed, and have the songs to prove it. Sometimes, the connection is clear by the nature of the song; Deseándote by Frankie Ruiz takes me straight back to Puerto Rico, or John Butler Trio to Hanson Bay in Australia. Other times, however, the connection between song and place is more personal. Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged album added in June 2018 makes me think of working some of my last shifts at High Tor Gear Exchange in Charlottesville, or all of the Rise Against songs added throughout early 2015 reminding me of my biweekly drives to Stokesdale, NC with Peter Hase to an in-person book club.

As one would expect when so many eras of life share a single space, when listening to the playlist on shuffle I invariably will encounter strange combinations of music. I’ll listen to a Dave Matthews song added in 2012, immediately followed by one by A Day to Remember added in 2017 or perhaps alt-J (2013) or Kanye (2018). Listening in shuffle, honestly my preferred strategy, can be cacophonous, jarring, or even embarrassing, like if I’m driving someone in my car that I don’t know very well and must quickly skip through a burst of my 2016 punk-rock phase.

The drawbacks of shuffle, however, are also its biggest benefits. As the current song fades, the knowledge that you couldn’t possible guess what will follow it up is nice in the era where everything is on demand; it’s like a pseudo-radio station comprised of all the music I have ever listened to and enjoyed. 

Turning off shuffle turns the playlist into a time capsule; if I organize by “date added”, suddenly I can scroll through a timeline of my life described in music. I see where I watched a bunch of Wes Anderson movies in mid-2021 and added a bunch of songs off his soundtracks; I see when Collin Rose and I binged O.A.R. and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros in our hammocks our junior year of high school; I see when my high school civics and economics teacher, Mr. Scarbro, introduced me to The Black Keys in class my freshman year; I can see the first time Walker Robinson released music on Spotify in 2017 with the Community Service E.P.; I see every December since college started, when I go home and add a bunch of hip hop songs because I’m hanging out with my friends from high school.

The emotional salience of this chronology is hard to understate. Scrolling through this list instantly surfaces memories made vibrant by the very music that itself serves at the reminder. Looking at groups of songs or albums in the order in which they were added makes me think of the person who showed me the song, the concert where I first witnessed it, or the incomparable feeling of combing through a new artist’s discography and picking out new favorites. Sometimes, a cluster of songs evokes strong memories of a particular person: a first date, a tragic loss; a treasured friendship.

Music, like all good art forms, is about communicating sincere emotion. Perhaps because of this essential characteristic, music and memories often become so intertwined as to be inseparable. Playing a given song or band can often be an inescapable trigger for some memory—happy or sad, amusing or embarrassing.

Time changes how we interact with these songs and memories too. As we change and grow over the years, our relationship to the soundtracks of our lives changes as well. We reinterpret and re-experience songs that at one time might have represented a deep sadness but now recall fond memories. Songs that were bangers over time become triggers for yearning nostalgia or saudade.  

Despite the changes to my relationships with these songs, albums, and artists, even as the technologies and places where I listen have changed; despite my shifts in taste over time; one thing has remained constant:

The songs are all real slappers.