Favorite Echoes
Illustration by Aimee Lew
No, I am not going to tell you my favourite song.
If asked, at best, I will offer a grab bag of songs I’ve enjoyed recently (few, on repeat ad nauseam rather than many infrequently) – but don’t expect to buttonhole me into anything more precise than that.
I’d even venture so far as to say: being asked “what is your favourite artist/song/album?” is one of my least favourite questions. That’s not because I don’t enjoy talking about music or otherwise (on the contrary, I talk too much, and – god knows – too fast). Nor is it because I’m skittish and don’t like feeling knotted down too tightly (though surely there are a few who would say I am).
Rather, imagine: a stranger sits you down in a public place and, after a half hour or so, asks you to pry open your skull and let them wander about in the bookshelf corridors of your head for a while. Just a quick jaunt through the id, without guardrails, guidelines, or Virgil, after which they will pop back out and express a casual judgement about what they heard in there. I imagine few would be particularly keen.
Even for us open-book, eager-grinning Americans, it continues to surprise me that this intensely intimate question is tossed about with such irreverence – here, in the great metropolis of the eastern seaboard where we swing from one diphthong to the next over jumbles of consonants, eager to finish our thought and return, head down, to our solitary charge through the city – even here! It persists.
For the moment, if you’ll join me in setting aside my personal prickiness, oddness, and jut-chin snobbery – just for a moment – let me outline how I organize the back-catalogue of sound I pump into my ears throughout the day. Maybe we can discover something on the way!
--
I structure my Spotify by year and season – four playlists a year, with a bit of lead time on the season of their direct relevance (think of seeing the F/W 20XX clothing collection released in August, and you’ll get the idea). This is notable enough to have earned me disbelieving & confused expressions from friends and acquaintances, but not entirely unheard of – a search through Spotify reveals numerous similar record racks among the anonymous many.
Each season of a given year is built around an initial core of songs dropped in when the playlist is created – a core which is itself a combination of standard bearers I include every autumn or summer etc., and new discoveries I’ve picked up more recently. From there, the playlist takes on a life of its own, expanding over the next few months through algorithm-driven discovery, friends’ recommendations, and sudden inspirations. Critical to this is a certain discipline – I do not listen to “out of season” songs throughout the rest of the year: winter songs are for winter, spring for spring, summer for summer. (There are exceptions – some music I strongly associate with one season, some multiple – but in general, this is important).
What season a song belongs to is entirely personal – maybe it’s when I discovered it, maybe it’s how the album makes me feel, maybe it’s the content of the lyrics, maybe all, maybe none. After a few months, the leaves dry and fall, the snows melt, the summer sun dims, and the process begins anew. (Usually, this is spurred by a particularly unseasonable day – the kind that will make the barista ask if you’re enjoying the weather out there. I started “2021 Spring,” for example, on an unseasonably balmy day just after a Nor’easter in January).
I don’t know where this cataloguing structure came from. I started using it about half a decade ago, I think entirely organically. It is extremely particular – it would shock no one that I am also a meticulous bed-maker and picture-straightener. And I love it dearly, despite its silliness: by accident or luck or some combination of the two, it is how I embark on that most powerful musical experience: time travel.
You know what I mean, I suspect, even if you didn’t use that word for it. A song you haven’t heard in months or years comes on, a song that somewhere in your cortex’s reference catalogue has been filed along with a time, place, people, moment now dust in the wind. If you close your eyes, you can feel yourself transported – the notes carve open the heart and explode through every capillary in a kaleidoscope of image, sensation, memory, previously locked away and forgotten. But for a moment, in your godhead fever, you’re there…
14, stepping off the train on November 14 as a sophomore in high school.
17, whipping windows-down through the Pine Barrens in the bleak heat of summer.
19, boots crunching the new-fallen snow as the drums crash in your ears.
20, zoned-in, over-caffeinated, terrified, the smell of work and a threadbare chair cushion.
22, loving and frozen in the predawn glow, certain that this is It.
And then it’s gone. Chilled, shaken, glowing, you’re left with that – back in the present, a bit out of sorts, as if you’ve lept across a few too many years at once, remembering what was.
At least, that’s how it feels for me.
Chris Phillips is a salesman from Philadelphia who now lives in Washington, D.C. He misses the arts, and pops in now and again to complement them on how much they’ve grown since last time.