When did you make your first mixtape?

Did you have the luxury of a Hi-Fi system with a turntable and dual cassettes?

Did you perfect your record button timing, developing a hair-trigger efficiency that allowed you to skip the last ramblings of the DJ but still catch the first note of the tune you’d been waiting for all night?

Did you settle in each night to stalk the “Nine at Nine” countdown, knowing some new favorites would be offered up for your latest compilation?

I spent my teenage years buying cassette tapes six at a time. I preferred 90-minute tapes, and often wrote down track times, doing the math to come as close to maximizing that 45-minutes per side on each one.

If you were a mixtape fanatic in the analog days of yore, then the digital playlist was nothing short of a miracle when you learned about it.

Mastering the digital playlist

I am torn between bullish bouts of creativity in playlist creation and bearish periods of frustration over the stress of repetition, what may not belong or may be left out, and list names that just don’t fit.

You know what I mean. The list you have called “new stuff” which becomes old stuff because you have since created a “more new stuff” or “newer stuff” list. What happens to music that’s no longer new, but not old enough to be old?

My “new stuff” was superseded by “new groove” because more differentiation in the name helped me sleep at night. “New groove” is primarily Neo-soul with some more obscure rock that I don’t want to see lost in the library. It is simply a timestamp on my musical preferences as life goes on.

In all, there are currently 127 playlists vying for my attention every day. 

I have a “gym” playlist that has been generally relegated to when I mow the lawn. I began trying to get a bit of a workout by throwing my army rucksack on and trekking three to five miles and found the “gym” list was a little casual. From the upbeat rock tunes of the “gym” list, I shifted to a 90-song list called “ruck” that is more edgy – Rage Against the Machine, Soundgarden, The Cult, Metallica, Fight, AC/DC, and Five Finger Death Punch among others. There’s something motivating and relaxing about pounding the pavement to something really hard and angry. 

I’m not one-dimensional. I also have a George Winston list, and one of nothing but Gregorian chants. We have jazz, and more specifically, jazz trumpet.

There are playlists by decade, crossing purposes with those by genre. There is yacht rock, and 60’s psychedelic rock. And of course I have a couple of lists of protest tunes.

At one point I tasked myself with creating a playlist of the 600 essential songs everyone should know, with no more than two songs from any one artist. The “essentials” playlist is hardly up to date a decade later and is one I go back to now and again to remember how simple my musical taste can be and how shallow my knowledge is. I had no idea what I didn’t know. Since then I’ve come to terms with the reality that for every new thing I discover, there are dozens eluding me.

Some lists are a few dozen songs, others – like the one creatively titled “80s” – are as many as 1,400.

I’ve learned I don’t even have to create my own playlists anymore. Apple Music routinely offers me new ones, and often they are excellent. Half the fun of mining for new music is finding an artist, then seeing how many other mystery artists are suggested over the next few days. Favorites like Sticky Fingers, Dope Lemon, Fat Freddy’s Drop, Chet Faker, Magic City Hippies, Poolside, and FKJ worked their way into my infinite loop that way. 

My only fear? Not knowing what I have to listen to. It’s a real stress (whether it should be or not) and I always worry I’ll miss something or forget it. Remember that final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, in the giant government warehouse full of crates? I both love and fearfully respect my music library like it is such a warehouse. Limitless, in the best and worst ways.

What’s in a playlist?

Everything. Heart and soul. It’s a treasure map of your music journey and keen insight into who you are. It is your here and now. It is your past. And everyday it is pointing you to your future.

Its a catalog to share, sometimes eagerly, sometimes sheepishly. We all have that song we love that we aren’t sure we want everyone to know about, right?

“Ice Ice Baby”? “Sexy Eyes”? “Mirror in the Bathroom”?

Don’t worry, I won’t tell.

But I think deep down we make playlists for other people as much as we do for ourselves. We’ve all made mixtapes for someone important. We’ve all had playlists at the ready for a party or a roadtrip, hoping someone would say, “hey, why don’t you pick some music.”

Why else would we have a playlist called “80s” and another called “80s favorites”?

I want to hear about your playlists, your strategy for creating them, and what perplexes you about them. Tell me, for you, what’s in a playlist?