Blog1 min read
On revisiting a playlist after six months
What the playlist tells you about yourself six months later.
Going back to a playlist I haven't touched in six months is one of the more useful exercises in this work. The tracks have not changed. The room has. So has the listener, slightly. The playlist gets re-evaluated against both.
Some tracks land harder than they did. They've grown into the room, or my ears have grown into them. A few I'd half-forgotten reveal themselves as the actual core of the playlist, and I'm grateful past-me put them in.
Other tracks have aged. Not the music's fault — moods drift, contexts change, the year is different. A track that felt right in winter sounds airless in summer; a track that worked when I had a particular kind of week stops working when the week is different. Those come off, gently.
The whole exercise is humbling. You realise the playlist was never finished. None of them are. The most a curator can do is leave the playlist in a slightly better state than they found it, then walk away for six months and come back.