I think we need a little break today!
Did you know that I was once a band nerd?
I started playing piano when I was like 6, had a stint in violin in 5th grade, decided orchestra sucked, tried to learn the flute in 2 weeks so that I didn’t have to stay in beginner band, and didn’t look back. Oh, and I picked up the alto sax somewhere down the line, which transitioned to tenor once I got to high school. It all stopped senior year, when I decided the competition made me crazy and insecure about my skills. I realized there was a world outside of band. So I dropped all the instruments, and then actually never looked back (well I dropped piano much earlier than that, because my piano teacher was this spooky lady from Julliard and honestly scared the daylights out of me).
But I still loved music, and that curiosity needed to be let out somewhere.
So yay, Spotify! My favorite app.
[Not to say that I love it unconditionally — I’m a little skeptical about how they compute my annual Top Songs & I am waiting for the day you can look up a song and be able to see if you have it in any of your playlists.]
As many of my friends can attest, I have quite a few playlists. Some look to have been eagerly made but quickly forgotten (with a mere two or three songs), and some have very odd names, which is the point of my post today!
What’s in a name? [BTW, I do have a playlist name that has a slight reference to Romeo & Juliet]
Honestly, not much, sometimes.
Category 1: Self Explanatory
“TEEN ANGST”
“RELAXIN”
“ROCKNROLL”
“kpop”
“happy && upbeat”
“TBT” and its sister “TBT 2.0”
“when you only like ~10 seconds”
“sad bois”
“2 bob ur head 2”
“train ride tunes”
“musicals I’ve peruse-icaled”
“oh my, how suggestive”
Category 2: Songs that don’t actually go together but it’s my Spotify so they do.
“hop on the xylophone”: songs that have a xylophone in them.
“spot the differents”: pairs of songs that sound identical to one another.
“k”: a playlist of 26 songs which have songs beginning with each letter of the alphabet.
“exploradora”: songs with places as their titles.
“nomtague”: songs with female names, also titles with the word “girl”. [I switched around the letters of Montague, because nom is the French word for ‘name’, aka the names he calls his Juliet.]
“frankenstein”: recordings of live music. [It’s ALIVE!]
“tickle me pink”: songs with colors in the name
“madeline”: pairs of songs that have the same name [lined up 2 by 2!]
“don’t judge a book by its” covers.
Category 3: originally unoriginal
“alex, come with me to honne” was created for my friend Alex, when I tried to convince him to come to a Honne concert with me (didn’t work).
“these r classics” is full of classical music.
“bruh” is some music that I enjoyed during a time in my life when I used to say bruh non-ironically in college.
“crunchy pb sux” is full of music that reminds me of smooth peanut butter (the superior peanut butter).
“mashed potatoes” is full of music that is lovey and mushy.
“this is not like other playlists” is full of songs that I feel like, if they were girls, they’d think they were not like other girls.
“papaYAS” is just a bunch of songs I liked during a realization that papayas is also, “papa, YAS”.
“sated & caffeinated” is music you listen to when you are either sated and/or caffeinated.
“elated & caffeinated” see “sated & caffeinated”
“deets, treats, meats” is full of beats.
“who do you know here” is music I’d imagine listening to at a club.
“bin ‘16”/ “bin ‘17”/ “bin ‘18”/ “bin ‘19”/ “bin ‘20”/ “bin ‘21” is music that I like from that year. In computer science, the bin contains all the binary files for a program. So get with my program!
“alt f4” is alternative music. Alt + F4 will close the program and I have called it that because I no longer really listen to this music (’twas more a high school phase).
“saran” rap. ha ha ha ha hahaha
Category 4: Hurricane!
I don’t have much to say here other than the fact that a lot of the remaining playlists are ones that I made for him or the ones he made for me. I know, will have to go through these at some point, but I find it too awful to simply delete a playlist that we made for our future kids (“pterry’s pterrific ptunes”), or even the random ones that we made to make each other’s days.
I will say though, after the first two “stages” of our relationship, I created “somo” and “sum mo somo”. FOMO may be the fear of missing out, but somo is the sadness of missing out. As such, they’re filled with a lot of sad (but great!) songs, that helped me get through those times in my life.
Perhaps I should go make a third.
