Spotify Playlist

Why I Put This Playlist Together

This playlist did not begin as a project, a brand, or a plan. It began the way most meaningful things do, quietly and without intention. I was talking about music, one song at a time, and over time those songs began to gather weight.

On TikTok, I make short videos about music that lasts. Not just hits, but songs that carry memory, emotion, and history. Some are obvious classics. Some are songs people forgot they loved until they heard the first few seconds again. What matters to me is not popularity, but endurance. These are songs that survived long after trends moved on, songs that stayed because they attached themselves to moments in people’s lives.

As the videos accumulated, a pattern formed. Viewers would comment with stories. Someone heard a song again for the first time in twenty years. Someone remembered a parent, a car ride, a relationship, a season of life they thought they had lost. The same question kept appearing, not all at once, but steadily: is there a playlist?

At first, I ignored it. The videos felt complete on their own. Each one stood as its own small reflection. But over time, I realized that in my own mind, these songs were already connected. They were not connected by genre or decade, but by experience. By the fact that music has a way of attaching itself to memory and refusing to let go.

So I began to collect them.

This playlist is not curated in the way most playlists are. There is no attempt to control mood, tempo, or tone. There are songs that are loud and aggressive, followed by songs that are quiet and reflective. Some tracks feel joyful. Others feel heavy. That unevenness is intentional, because that is how music actually enters our lives. It does not arrive neatly labeled. It arrives in moments of joy, grief, boredom, loneliness, and connection.

What this playlist represents is continuity. Each song exists here because it appeared somewhere else first, in a video, in a conversation, in a memory shared by a stranger in a comment section. The playlist is simply a place where those songs can exist in full, without being cut down to sixty seconds.

There is no expectation attached to it. You are not meant to listen straight through. You are not meant to like every song. Some may not resonate at all. That is fine. Music does not work by universal agreement. It works by personal connection.

I am sharing this playlist here because this platform allows for a different pace. TikTok is fast by design. It rewards immediacy. Vocal is slower. It leaves room for reflection, for context, for explaining why something matters instead of just presenting it. The playlist fits into this space quietly. It does not demand attention. It waits.

For me, this playlist is also a record of how music has functioned in my own life. Music has always been more than background noise. It has been a way to process emotion, to survive difficult seasons, and to remember who I was at different points in time. Certain songs act like timestamps. You hear them, and suddenly you are somewhere else, with someone else, feeling something you did not expect to feel again.

If you found this through the videos, consider the playlist an extension of that ongoing conversation. If you found it here first, then it stands on its own. Either way, it exists for the same reason the videos exist: to slow down, to remember, and to give music the space it deserves.

If nothing else, I hope there is at least one song here that brings something back to you. A moment, a person, a version of yourself you thought was gone. Sometimes that is all music needs to do to matter.