Mixtapes
On Making You a Playlist
Eleven songs, one argument: that a playlist is the closest thing we have to a love letter you can dance to.
There is a particular kind of nerve it takes to hand someone a playlist. More than a book, more than a photograph, a song arrives already fully formed, carrying its own tempo and mood and history, and to offer one to another person is to say: I could not find the words, so I found the next best thing. This essay is about that impulse, and about the eleven songs below that are, depending on how you look at it, either an explanation or an excuse.
I used to think the mixtape was a dying art, a casualty of the algorithm's insistence on doing the work for us. Autoplay does not need us to choose a next song; it has already chosen twelve. But sequencing by hand is a different act entirely. It is editorial, in the oldest sense of the word: a series of decisions about what matters, what comes first, and what gets to linger. A playlist built by a person, for a person, is still one of the few private forms of publishing left.
The first song on this list took four months to earn its place. I kept swapping it out, worried it announced too much too early, the way a first paragraph can give away an entire essay if you are not careful. Eventually I stopped trying to be clever about the opening and just picked the song I actually wanted to hear first. That, it turns out, is most of the craft: less curation than confession.
There is a theory that the second track on any well-made playlist is the real thesis statement, the one that tells you what the whole thing is actually about, once the opener has done its job of getting you to press play. I will not tell you which track that is here. Some things are still better discovered than explained, and a good essay, like a good playlist, should leave a little room for the reader to do their own listening.
What I can tell you is that the middle of the list is where I stopped being careful. The early songs are the ones I imagined you hearing first, polished for a stranger's ear. The middle ones are the ones I play when no one else is listening, which is another way of saying they are the most honest and the least designed. If the playlist works, you won't be able to tell where one becomes the other.
By the ninth track, the argument, if there ever was one, has mostly given way to feeling. This is by design. An essay can only carry a thought so far before it needs music to say the rest. That has always been the appeal of the form: two media doing what neither can do alone, the writing pointing at something the songs then go and do.
The playlist ends the way most good ones do, not with a conclusion but with a song that makes you want to start again from the top. I have listened to it more times than I can count while writing this, which either undermines or proves the point, depending on how generous you are feeling. Either way, it is below. Press play, and read the rest with it running underneath, the way it was written.