Nearly 5 Years of Making Playlists Can Do Something to a Person

I was looking through all the monthly playlists I’ve been making since January 2018, and I realized that I will have been making them for five years as of next month. That will be 60 monthly playlists. According to the master playlist I keep, I’ve shared 2,234 songs that would take you 5.7 days to listen to.

Morgan, Elan. Waking the Brain. 2022, digital art via MidJourney AI.

I started making playlists in January 2018 when I noticed friends on social media still primarily sharing music from at least 20 years ago, and it was boring. I wanted novelty, I wanted to wake up the part of my brain that listens.

I am Mennonite by heritage, so I grew up singing harmony in choirs since I was about 5 or 6 years old. I was generally an alto but was occasionally called over to stand with the tenors when they were short a boy or two. One of my favourite things about singing in choirs was measuring my voice against those around me. I often stood immediately beside some boy singing low while also standing behind a soprano and flanked by another alto who sang every note just ever-so-slightly sharp. Each nearby voice had its own treble, tenor, and trueness. In the right kind of room I could feel our collective vibration humming through my skin.

So I’ve been exercising the part of my brain that listens for 4 years and 11 months, and I’m so glad I decided to do this. The incredible wealth of new music that is out there astounds me. I can’t comprehend it. Humans make so much incredible stuff, and diving into it daily is a constant reminder of how much the world has in it. It’s humbling how infinitesimally small my sliver of experience is, and this wealth reminds me of how much sheer possibility is floating around on this earth.

Honestly, we’re astonishing.