Tell a Story with Music

Music is an indispensable part of my life and my creative process. More than just listening to music, though, I love putting together playlists. A playlist to me is never about shoving together a random list of my favorite songs. I like telling a story in a playlist.

In the 1980s, I was making mix-tapes. In the 1990s and 2000s, I was making mix-CDs. I loved taking music and thinking about how one track followed the next. How they built on each other. 

With the dawn of streaming music, mix-tapes/CDs may be a thing of the past, but playlists are still going strong, only now I have access to almost every song ever recorded. I am the kid in the candy shop creating playlists for different moods, different concepts, and (of course) different stories.

So, here’s this week’s creativity calisthenics:
Tell a story through a music playlist.

A few tips for telling a story with music:

• The order matters: Good stories aren’t random (ok, Lost Highway is, but it’s the exception to the rule). The song order needs to move the story along from beginning to end and pacing matters. Five fast songs in a row would be like watching five fight scenes in a row. Variety is the space of life and story telling too.
• Build the story over time: You don’t have to make the entire playlist in one go. Add a few to outline the story and then, as you listen to your music, add ones that help you flush out the narrative.
• Don’t just pick your favorites: It’s tempting to only use songs off your top 100 playlist, but can you really say everything you want to say with just the songs you always listen to? Dig deep in your library. You may rediscover a song you haven’t thought about in years that’s perfect for the story.
• Search around for music that’s new to you: Beyond choosing more than your favorites, don’t be afraid to fire up the keyword search to look for new songs that may fit your narrative. You may even find a new favorite.
• Keep it to yourself or share it with others: I have playlists that I share publicly, but I have several that are only for me or a very select audience. Don’t hold yourself back from expressing yourself for fear of what others will think. Like your playlist story? Share a link in the comments here.

Don’t have your own story to tell? 

Here are a few Ideas.

Score a Book or rescore a Movie

It’s easier to start with a story you already know. Pick a work of fiction and tell the story through music. For this list, I chose one of my favorite comic book characters, an intergalactic bounty hunter called Lobo, and created a score to the movie I would like to make.

Lobo→ https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/lobo/pl.u-MDAWl6qtWk2oV3

Tell the story of your life

 For the last several years, I’ve been curating a list of songs that tell the story of my life. If you want to understand who I am and how I came to be, this is a great place to start. I’m up to 139 tracks, lasting a little over 10 hours. I’ve carefully ordered them chronologically, but not necessarily in the order I first heard them or when they were released. Instead, they meant something to me at the time I’m describing or because they describe a part of my life even if I hadn’t heard them at the time.

Morte de Jason→ https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/morte-de-jason/pl.2653e180efab4bee91432979f62c82c3