We often experience emotions before we can articulate them. Sometimes, music gives us a place to start. Every playlist starts as one of those moments. Enough of them, saved and returned to, start to look like an unfolding of who we were, are, and are still becoming. One thing about me is I looove music. I’ve always been passionate about how music and storytelling intersect. I love curating playlists. It’s my way of expressing emotions and narratives beyond words. No matter what the occasion is, or what emotions I feel, I probably have the playlist for it. This case study explores that fascination through playlists I've created & collected over time. Diving deeper into what happens when songs spills past being just a song into something that brings a sense of belonging.

I wonder:
Can our playlists become records of who we were, what we are, and who we're becoming?

I didn't realize I was keeping a diary until I looked back and saw how much time passed between the creation of the playlist & the time it took to eventually coming back to listen to it again.

My Process

I draw inspiration from five (5) main sources:

1. Character & personality - Sometimes, a song just screams — or sings, rather — a certain personality.

2. Film - Movies with a distinct emotional register inspire me to find that same feeling in music form.

3. Literature - Some of my playlists are named after lines that stuck with me. The title becomes the emotional thesis; the songs are my attempt to prove it.

4. Lived Experiences - Sometimes there's no character, film, or book standing between me and the feeling only the direct hit of feeling itself. When emotions get the best of me, building a playlist becomes the most direct way I have of processing them.

5. Other people's curation Not every bridge has to be one I build myself. Sometimes someone else has already translated a feeling I recognize, and saving their playlist is its own act of curation.

"anna coleman's iPod"

— main charater from freaky friday (2003)

My most-saved playlist. Built entirely around the idea that a person's music taste is their personality. It's framed as an iPod specifically because that's the device Anna would have been listening on in 2003, so the playlist had to sound like it too. Contains not just songs she'd like, but songs that actually existed on her shuffle at that moment in time.

Selected Playlists:

"i never realize how much i like being home unless i've been somewhere different for a while"

a line from juno (2007)

Inspired by the movie Juno (2007). The film has a very specific, slightly off-kilter warmth. I wanted to know if I could recreate that feeling using only music. To add, the line resonates as a feeling that only makes sense in retrospect. It's something you notice while you're gone so much that you almost miss the version of home you left behind.

"the abstraction of pain"

— 'perhaps the chief difference of me now and me then is my tolerance for terror'

Named after a line from It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken. The book's description of pain as something abstract became the brief for the playlist. Every song had to sit inside that ambiguity rather than an attempt to resolve that feeling.

"grief is love with nowhere to go"

— how beautiful it is to feel with intensity and depth, even if it's sorrow. nothing lasts forever.

In times when emotions get the best of us, music finds a way to soften the sharp edges of the moment. This playlist exists for that grief that hasn't found its shape yet, given somewhere to sit.

"tell the truth, but tell it slant"

— a short poem by Emily Dickinson, an early alchemist of sapphic longing

This playlist is not something I built, but something I simply recognized. Its title comes from Emily Dickinson's short poem of the same name, one of the clearest statements of her belief that some truths are too much to face head-on and have to arrive sideways, in metaphor.

Dickinson wrote from near-total reclusion, using poems to speak around things she had no acceptable language for which scholars believe is about her decades-long relationship with her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson. Over time, Dickinson has been reclaimed as an early alchemist of sapphic longing in American poetry.

That's exactly the philosophy behind this playlist: some truths only land when they arrive indirectly. I didn't build this bridge but I know exactly why I'm standing on it.

A playlist doesn't just describe a feeling the way a diary entry might. It re-enacts the experience of feeling. Just like how a scent of an old perfume rushes memories. It feels like a door opens to a specific time of your life. Shuffling songs you used to love and the feeling returns before you've even remembered why.

That's what makes music different from a photo or a journal page: it doesn't just document what happened, it holds what it felt like.

Key Takeaways

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