A Playlist to Remember

I am putting the finishing touches on my Summer 2024 playlist. This isn’t a collection of the summer’s hottest hits, although Chappell Roan and Charli XCX did make it on there. It’s a mix of the songs that I’ve been listening to this summer, regardless of when they came out — more Barack Obama than Billboard.

I’ve been curating this playlist all summer, adding to it whenever I notice there’s a song or an album that I’ve been listening to again and again such that it’s becoming part of my life soundtrack. My Summer 2024 playlist is not meant to be listened to during the Summer of 2024. It’s for the Winter of 2024, or some far-off day in 2035, when I want to evoke this period of time. This period of time when I rediscovered Genesis and became convinced that their 1983 song “That’s All” might be the best song ever written. When I spent an entire month listening to only “Worth It” by Raye and “You’ll Accomp’ny Me” by Bob Seger until I knew every lyric and drumbeat and guitar riff by heart.

When I hear these songs in the future, they’ll trigger memories from this summer. I’ll be back by the lake where a duck walked right out of the water and stood by my beach chair. I’ll be sitting on the screened-in porch drinking iced coffee while the rain blows in. By making a playlist of the season, I’m delineating a chapter of my life. I’m engineering a mechanism to induce nostalgia in the future.

This dividing of life into chapters is something I’ve become more deliberate about doing as I’ve gotten older. I don’t want one season to just bleed into the next, the days losing their distinctness, vivid experiences fading as they recede into memory. Anything that can create order out of the accumulation of life lived seems useful. Sometimes I’ll just go around and take photos of my apartment so that I’ll have a record of how it looked in this moment in time: the plants and the bedsheets and the clothes piled on the chair. They’re not photos I want to look at now, but 20 years from now when I’ve forgotten about these details that are mundane but so essential to my daily life.

My friend Grace has been making monthly playlists for the 10 years I’ve known her. She calls them her musical diary. “I don’t keep a written journal, but I can look back at the playlists and remember how I was feeling at that time, what was going on in my life: a breakup, a move, a low, a high,” she told me recently. This is what I want: reliable ways to conjure the feelings, the major and minor events.

I feel a lot of remorse around not keeping a journal, a record of my days. I kept one as a kid, but in college, I made the error of reading those cloth-covered notebooks. It was too soon — I was so embarrassed at my young self’s hopes and concerns and insights (or lack thereof) that I took the diaries and threw them in the dumpster behind my dorm. How stupid! How rash! Ever since, any effort to keep a journal has felt doomed, a stop-and-start affair that’s always tinged with anger at my college self’s impulsivity.