Getting Out Over My Skis

Red - cassette; Orange - CD-R; Green - iTunes;
Purple - Spotify; Yellow - Tidal.

I strive to make my playlists as organically as possible. That means listening to music I love, plus discovering new music I like, and putting together playlists that represent where I'm at today. Even talking about it sounds pretentious, but that's the idea. I don't pretend that it's an art. My best playlists I would call "well crafted". Then there are times when I'm too eager to make a playlist, and I force it: I search for singles by bands I like, then I put them on a playlist before even listening to them twice; I proactively search for songs by bands I love that never made it onto a playlist. "Forcing it" can result in a good playlist, but I know in my heart the best playlists will remind me of a brief chapter of my life.

If I wasn't ever proactive, if I only made one when the mood struck, I'd probably only made 3 or 4 new playlists a year. The craftsman in me won't settle for that. I have found a healthy cadence around 9 or 10 a year.  The only times when I broke my cadence:

• 1995: working the graveyard shift with loads of free time
• 2010-2016: raising children
• 2021: bought a house

In 2024, I've already made nine playlists in three months, and I'll tell you how: I went into "assembly line" mode. Instead of hand-crafting the vases, I started machine-manufacturing them. For example, I read an interview with Ray Davies, I listened to a Kinks collection, and then dropped 3 or 4 Kinks songs into the hopper. I like placing an instrumental as the last track, so I listened to a ton of Booker T & The MG's, and then dropped 4 or 5 of their singles in the hopper too. I read my list of Beatles Songs Never Used on A Playlist and dropped 3 or 4 of those. In the end, I collected a 60 songs, and sorted them into multiple 20-track playlists in parallel: 223, 224, and 225 were all made at once by this method. 227-230 followed quickly after.

As of today, I have a new hopper with 70 tracks in it. I am way out over my skis for 2024. There's no hurry to create new playlists. I'm going to wait however long it takes until I'm ready to pull together an organic playlist. In the meantime I am going to enjoy all 230 playlists in my collection - in the last month I've listened to about 60 playlists in the archive - and see how it feels.