There are some songs I still associate with one another solely because I first heard them on a mixed tape someone had given me.

My coming of age was marked by a series of mixed tapes, made by me, for me, and for friends, often comprised of all of the music either they or I wanted to hear but couldn’t. When I was an adolescent, you heard music in two places: on the radio and on the TV. Or, as happened to me once, while strolling a record store, where I fell hopelessly in love with the Pixies’ Doolittle at first listen.

I owe much to the kindness and assiduous taste of my fellow music-loving friends. Aside from the radio and TV, I’m not sure how I’d’ve managed to hear half of what I listened to had it not been for those mixed tapes. Music was a necessary but expensive habit.

I loved coming up with a theme, and then formulating a playlist based around it, of all the best tracks that I could possibly think of, from my own collection. This was a lot harder in the era before digital music and streaming.

The flipside of being spoiled for choice, able to find and listen to anything with a swipe and a tap, means that putting your device on shuffle is an invitation to be annoyed. As if a trickster god is your DJ, inevitably you’ll get a string of the songs you categorically do not want to hear, all in a row. Skip, skip, skip, skip…

This is easily thwarted with a playlist.

I have taken to playlist making with the same enthusiasm that I once had for mixed tapes, the task of selecting tracks just as delicate, and divined in ways akin to magic: by fleeting thoughts and associations, suggestions so keen they seem whispered into your ear. 

I am fond of making playlists that match either a project I’m working on, or a set of emotional requirements. Lately, I’ve been deep into one with the banal title “Music to keep you going!” and which I’ve crowned with an image of Lynda Carter-era Wonder Woman, a childhood idol of mine. What better image to associate with persistence than a 1970s version of an Amazon queen?

Looking at the music on this playlist, I’m challenged to explain my choices. But that is the beauty of a playlist you make for yourself: it only ever has to make sense to you, and the sense can be in the most tenuous of ways, evocative only to your own idiosyncratic brain with its subconscious associations and misheared lyrics.

There are songs that on their face are motivational (“You’ll Find a Way” and "Look At These Hoes" by Santigold), yes, but then there are the ones that sound retributive, even vengeful (“World Ender” by Lord Huron). They carry an energy of comeback, which at this juncture in life is what I feel most deeply: an arising of self and of purpose, of calling ("Go It Alone" by Beck). It has taken me a lot longer than most to get here. I carry an odd mix of having gathered everything I needed—in the right place at the right time—and simultaneously of having lost too much of the one thing I don’t have control over: time. And needing to make up ground, and get far enough down this path that progess can be marked by being unrecognizable to some who used to know me (“Somewhere Else” by Travis).

I have always been a late bloomer, somehow requiring that level of difficulty. To make it what? Glorious enough in victory and agonizing enough in defeat? Which reminds me of something else I did at the last possible minute: motherhood. For which I also had a playlist—for the birth anyhow—not that anyone bothered to put it on. In the middle of a 12-hour labour unaided by drugs, I was not thinking of the choice selection of tracks meant to help me call my daughter into the world. But come to think of it, many of them would fit on the motivational playlist, as that also carried much of the same questioning energy: would I be able, at this late stage, to have a child? Was I up to the task not only of birthing my child, but of raising her? Matrescence was daunting, physically and emotionally. But I did it.

There are always moments when you think to yourself that something you want dearly is sitting on a tightrope between happening and not happening. It’s just the sort of emotional state that is perfect to match to a playlist.