Spotify Time Capsules

A realization that I’ve come to in my early 30s is that while I have a great memory for certain things (eg. people and band names, spellings of words), I have a terrible memory for many other things, like events.  Luckily, as I’ve noted in a previous post, I find music to be a fantastic time-capsule; oftentimes, I can hear certain songs, and call back a memory / feeling / setting I was in when that song was first in heavy rotation in my mind.

Being able recall these memories is important to me; in some ways, I feel like having and recalling memories differentiates us from automatons. Thus, to take advantage of this — for the lack of a better word — gift (not that I think i’m unique, rather I’m just very appreciative), I’ve decided to compile songs that I associated with certain years, and thus conjure certain feelings and memories, in the form of Spotify playlists.  I tend to listen to music as albums; thus, while any song on a heavily played album could likely do the trick, rather than include entire albums, I then just chose key songs that were particularly notable.  To make this clear: these playlists were meant for me, and thus not necessarily what I would consider the “best” songs, but just memory-inducing ones.  Though hopefully, the songs that I ended up choosing were still generally good songs worth listening to based on their own merit.

Songs off of albums that can’t be accessed due to limitations to the Spotify library are noted to the right of the year.

2006 – A lot of songs off of Murs “Murs 3:16: The 9th Edition”.
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012 – Also, a couple songs off of Maximo Park’s “The National Health”.
2013 – Also, about half the songs on Chance the Rapper’s “Acid Rap”.
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018

Sadly (or not, depending on how you look at it), I think a good 3/4 of the songs remind me of being in the lab, working.