The simple joy of creating playlists

the news sucks. so here's a good thing.

Ninety-eight years ago, this dusty old English writer named Virginia Woolf wrote a novel called Mrs. Dalloway that a lot of people said did a lot of revolutionary things. Mrs. Dalloway is short and moves quickly; you can read it in two or three days and the narrative arc of the book spans only one day. In that one day, the main character (Mrs. Dalloway) ostensibly does nothing but prepare for a party she throws that night. But of course a lot of other things are going on too.

The nice thing about Mrs. Dalloway is that it’s one of those books that’s so pretty that you can read it every few years and feel it all over again. And every time I read that book, I think about how you would write it in the digital era — what seemingly productive things you might do to occupy yourself on the morning of a party. And I always return to the most engaging movement of party-preparation: creating the playlist.¹

Creating the playlist is one of the few modern joys of art-creation that’s accessible to all of us and, I think, sometimes yawned upon by too many of us. Or maybe you could argue that it’s art-curation but to that, I say piss off and just give us this. Because the behavior of creating a playlist is so similar in function to the behavior of creating art. In creating a playlist, you are chasing the same sort of unprofitable fulfillment that artists get from creating art. You are trying to capture an emotion. A mood. To translate a feeling — and isn’t that all art is?²

And like art, creating a playlist is subjective. There’s no perfect playlist. There’s no perfect painting or book as there are perfect equations. In fact, it’s so subjective that you need no experience to create a playlist — only rudimentary technical knowledge. Anybody can do it and arguably be good at it. That’s why Spotify half-jokingly tried to hire post-White House Obama as their “President of Playlists.” He’s probably never created a playlist. But does that matter?

Of course, Barack Obama has officially put out a few Spotify playlists, but I have a hard time believing that he created them. Because, well, I’ll say it: I do not believe that Barack Obama listens to Harry Styles. And the presence of Harry Styles and Maren Morris on Barack Obama’s 2022 Summer Playlist smells to me like some old-school music industry lobbying.

Or maybe Barack Obama has created a playlist. I’m sure he’s familiar with the format. The Obama years were celebrated as a sort of second Camelot-era of Washington. The 44th White House threw parties that are still talked about. You might even pretend the president made the playlist for those events. But even for then-President Obama, such playlist curation seems an arduous task. A collection of music that will vibe with Dave Chapelle, Bruce Springsteen, Oprah and Beyonce in the room — how does anybody manage that?³

That attempt to capture and put-on an emotion over an extended period of time is part of what makes a playlist so special. A playlist is made of songs in the same way that a novel is made of sentences and paragraphs. Alone they may be pretty but if they are arpeggiated in a certain sort of way they can almost, well, breathe.

Normally, it would be a cringeworthy bit of poetic-overstepping for me to claim that a playlist breathes into the room. But you’re now about 600 words into this essay and I suspect that if you were going to click away, you’d have already pulled that trigger. So I’ll just say that a playlist does breathe into the room in that it acts as a sort of backdrop to the social situation happening atop it. And different social situations require different backdrops.

If, for example, I’m going to throw a party for my oldest fiends — who have, for the past decade, been mostly military men — that playlist will be different than the one I might assemble if I’m going to throw a party on the weekend of the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.⁴ And that's again different than a party you might occasionally stumble upon out here in Hollywood. God, just imagine what Truman Capote or Zelda Fitzgerald would have done with a Spotify playlist. ⁵

Now, I love a party with vinyls. But when you throw a party and put out all your vinyls, that’s as much vanity as authentic behavior. It takes too much dedication, too much time. And vinyls are wonderful for the beginning of the party but once people start enjoying themselves, we tend to forget that we’re listening to a record player and that it must be constantly fed records or the party will descend into a scratching sound and a puncturing of the mood. And so maybe you start your party with albums. But that sort of behavior is rarely sustainable. You have to switch to playlists. Playlists are sustainable.

They are sustainable through hell and high water and, with luck, they sustain you through quite a few things too. When I was younger and white-knuckled about flying, I made a chilled-out playlist for the airplane and as the plane hit turbulence, the knowledge that I had prepared for the anxiety, if only by making a playlist, somehow steeled me. You might create a playlist for anything, you might create it as a way to look into your future. You almost certainly have an idea of where you will be when you listen to that playlist — you know what mood you’re trying to capture.

And that mood can be anything. Some playlists are for getting through hell (one of my buddies made a playlist to get him through a hangover at the gym) but some are for heaven. You might throw a playlist together for a first dinner date, and that’s as much a relic as any movie stub. Or a road trip or doing the dishes. For a summer afternoon at the beach or a ski day. For feeding your kid breakfast or running or sleeping or being angry or sad or fucking. You might create a playlist for whatever you want.

Because creating a playlist is a bit like preparing for a party, like in Mrs. Dalloway. Sure, all you’re doing is tapping a little icon beside the titles of songs. But really, you’re doing something underneath all that.

And as a post-script here are some playlists:

Chez Baldwin — somebody put together this playlist that includes all the music from James Baldwin’s house in the South of France

Playboy’s An Ode to Spring Flings — now this here is a feeling

an old fashioned, please — this one by the 25-year-old congressman Max Frost has a vibe to it. He also has a playlist (SWEARING IN MUSIC) for his swearing-in. Because again, you can make a playlist for anything. even getting sworn into Congress.

also, I’m about 99% sure that Tiffany Trump has a sex playlist but I’m not going to link that lol. a few years ago, I sent Jared and Ivanka’s sex playlist to a HuffPost reporter and it became a whole thing.

1. Of course, you probably don’t create your party playlist on the day of your party, you probably create it weeks in advance. But you certainly fine-tune it on the day of your party. Maybe that morning, as you wake up and go to get coffee. Or maybe you’re stocking the last of the booze and one of your close friends (who arrive early, as close friends do) says hey, do we have a playlist going and you toss your phone to them and they do a final look-through.

2. I go back to this line from Tolstoy’s essay What is Art, “by art, in the limited sense of the word, we do not mean all human activity transmitting feelings, but only that part which we for some reason select from it and to which we attach special importance.”

and isn’t that all that creating a playlist is? looking at Spotify and selecting from it and attaching special importance?

3. I don’t know that there was ever a specific party with this exact guest list but it’s totally possible. They’ve all been spotted at Obama parties.

4. Also, I’ll be in town again this year for WHCD weekend, so put me on your party list (or don’t).

5. I always always find myself thinking of that scene in Tender is the Night when doomed-ass Dick is standing outside the house and he shouts over the backyard, "I want to give a really bad party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there's a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.”