To my two new friends

I was very lucky to attend the 2024 Nordic Music Therapy Conference a few weeks ago, in Aalborg, Denmark with a bunch of my friends. I met a lot of cool, interesting, like-minded people from around the world doing and thinking about the same stuff that I do in music therapy. A lot of the conversations and workshops also drift outside of the clinical/research realm and drift into our own experiences as people.

I’m trying not to leave that whole enlightening experience overseas, so this morning I wrote to some colleagues who put on a great presentation and with whom I had great conversations with afterward.

Hi Monika and Tora,

I hope you're doing well, and thanks for connecting with me on social media after the conference!

I wanted to let you know that I completed the suggested task from your wonderful presentation on The Art of Balancing. I sat with myself for 10 mornings in a row (or close to it), asked myself what I needed that day, and found a song to match. Before long, the songs began calling out to me so I would place the song first, and then figure out later why that was my song for the day. Here's the Spotify playlist I came up with:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2hx44pnB1vYqB4uzFbpu5L?si=762421f0c636496f

I'm particularly fond of how the red and green color scheme looks on the cover! More importantly, I find this playlist to hold a sense of a perfect, personal fit for me in this exact mid-summer moment.

...But there's also a surprise part 2, which has emerged from the technology...

Spotify of course is not a neutral body. It's an algorithmic system designed to keep me engaged for as long as possible; my attention, not the music, is the commodity upon which valuations are traded and fortunes are made, and I never fully forget that. Because of the ulterior motives of the app, a lot of the functions in Spotify frustrate me and take me out of my listening flow. Like when a favorite album ends, and Spotify plays inferior suggested tracks from other bands, or starts my album over from the beginning when I just need 30 seconds to reflect. Every tracklist and playlist is followed by a robotic curation of recommended tracks, and I hiss at my phone: "no! If I wanted to hear this I would have played it myself! Go away!" I turn these features off again and again, but with every update Spotify turns them back on.

I was about five days in when I looked past the bottom of my playlist. For the first time ever, I was awed that the six Spotify suggested tracks below my selections composed an amazing playlist of their own. Songs that I consider iconic classics of alternative music from the 70s and 80s - the generation before mine - and which hold an almost god-level status in my personal musical topography. Except for the Minnie Riperton track which I had never heard, and which blew my head off.

Is it just me, or does the music from the previous generation hold a mysterious sort of power? The songs that my friends' cool older siblings were listening to when I realized at 12 years old that I was listening to geeky junk while serious fans were out there being enlightened? Our sleek, beautiful elders (the high schoolers when we were in middle school; the college students when we were in high school) read poetry while I tried to decode record reviews in Rolling Stone. They laughed wildly outside the coffee shop as I rode by in the back seat of my mom's car. They smoked clove cigarettes, dyed their hair black, and tapped into the wavelengths of the gods while me and my friends were at the bowling alley rocking to The Offspring on the jukebox to infuriate the adults who had been kind enough to bring us there.

This greater music seemed to follow from an advanced understanding of arts and meaning that I craved, but was not yet capable of. My favorite bands and critics would mention these artists in print but I had no access to them myself. Sonic Youth constantly named musicians I had no way of hearing. One of Nirvana's record producers described in their biography the prototypical Nirvana fan as a 20-something woman named Janet who at 15 was "really into the Smiths."

"Okay, The Smiths. I should know who that is," I thought to myself at 13 years old. So when I heard their music and it was better than I ever imagined, I was all in, while understanding that I had missed them during their cultural moment. I wasn't "there" for it. I picture myself as a kindergartener, these bands hovering above me in misty clouds, waiting for me to grow up and discover them. And for me now, their music continues to sound from the heavens. Songs that have always existed; infinite, if a little distant still.

I added these six Spotify-recommended tracks, in order, to a separate playlist and filled it out later with four more suggested songs that hold that same high status for me. The soundtrack to my spirit, had I been born in 1971 instead of 1981. Here's the second playlist:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1fiCONoeteaOXzE4377PbP?si=07d838bca2684c95

The first list feels personal, the second feels universal (but just to me personally, lol). 

Thank you again for your presentation and for leading me to this new understanding of myself and my music! I hope you both are doing well and flowing nicely into your weekend.

As ever,

Mike