37. Spotify Wrapped

The seduction of musical compatibility

Hello hello. A whirlwind end to my semester means this is a week late (oops!). Planning to send some writing for paid subs only in the coming weeks/months, so if you don’t want to miss anything, upgrade to a paid sub to stay tuned and support this work!

If you’re a Spotify listener, you probably received your Spotify Wrapped this week, an admittedly brilliant marketing campaign where Spotify releases personalized music stats of the last year to listeners. 

Even if you don’t use Spotify, chances are you saw other people’s top songs and artists posted to social media. Many of us are happy to hand over our personal data and share our listening habits with the world via socials, promoting Spotify while we do it. And even though I know that’s what’s happening, that we’re just pawns in the hands of a multi-billion music streaming company, I still love to know what people are listening to. 

Part of my personalized breakdown. If I’m gonna tease it, I better share it.

This year, Phoebe Bridgers headlined my top five. She was my soundtrack of 2022, despite the fact that the only music she released this year was an EP of Christmas songs and a track in the movie Minions: Rise of Gru. 

Bridgers is an artist who has gotten an admittedly disproportionate amount of attention in these essays. I love her music, yes. But part of why I love her music is because I have loved a person who loves her music. 

A few months ago, a friend shared his million dollar dating app idea: one time in your life, and only once, you can click a button and Spotify will match you with your musical soulmate, the person whose tastes and listening preferences most closely parallel your own. When I heard the idea, I was sold.

I fall into this trap often: thinking I will get along with, maybe fall in love with, people who like the music I like. I assume a level of compatibility, maybe even spiritual connection, with the people who are diehards for the artists I love. But shared taste in music is not a proxy for compatibility, and assuming that it is ignores so much of the work that goes into creating actual intimacy. 

This past summer, I finally started playing my uncle’s Alvarez guitar, which he’d passed along to me several years ago. (I’d been meaning to learn how to play ever since, but for three years, I picked up the guitar for the sole purpose of moving it into a new apartment.) But six months ago I began picking it up to play four chords, muscling my way through guitar tabs that were too hard for me and pausing and playing YouTube tutorials to the annoyance of my roommates. (My sister did a brutal impression of my playing: she air strummed a chord while singing, then paused and fumbled with an imaginary chord change before she continued the lyrics.)

It was also during this summer of learning guitar that I reconnected with the person who loves Phoebe Bridgers. We had dated briefly two and a half years before, then dated other people, before gravitating back into the same orbit. She’d seen me running around Cambridge, my hair purple and short at the end of 2021, and we got a drink as friends. Then another drink as friends. By the spring, we stopped pretending it was only as friends, and I found myself giddy and greedy for days with her.

It was the summer romance I had been hoping for. And it lasted until the end of a brutal Boston July. My departure for school was never a secret, but it crept up from behind—I always imagine those sticky New England days will last forever. 

I packed everything I owned into a rental car, placing the guitar just behind the passenger headrest, and headed out for California. Every night we stopped along the road trip, I brought my plants and guitar into our motel room. Sometimes I quietly fingerpicked a song in a Red Roof Inn or a Motel 6. I had just learned how to play Phoebe Bridgers’ “Funeral,” my favorite song from her first album, and my favorite song to play. 

I kept driving further away from Boston and the person I was falling for, the miles of distance stretching to more than 3,000, but I kept playing Phoebe Bridgers. Once I’d set up my room in Berkeley and my sister had left and I’d gone to the DMV to get my new driver’s license, I found myself with an ocean of free time in the days before my program started. And so I practiced the guitar. 

My roommates are all talented musicians; they sing in a band, and our house contains a drum kit, a banjo, and at least six guitars. I was embarrassed that I was a beginning guitarist, so I practiced when no one was home or very quietly up in my attic bedroom. 

Making music was a comforting way to spend those early days in California. I learned every song I could from Phoebe’s 2017 Stranger in the Alps album. I watched many of Kyle Forester’s more than three dozen YouTube tutorials for Phoebe Bridgers songs. “Georgia” taught me how to hammer on. “Motion Sickness” forced me to learn barre chords. “Funeral” introduced me to Travis picking. 

I’d been meaning to learn guitar for years, and now I was finally doing it, moving forward in my new life with a new skill. But privately, I told myself that this project was bringing me closer to the person I’d left behind. It wasn’t so much that I thought one day I’d play her a setlist of acoustic Phoebe Bridgers covers and she’d swoon, falling head over heels for me. But I did almost believe that by playing these songs, I was keeping our tether intact from afar. Each half-practiced song I added to my repertoire brought us closer, I imagined. 

Of course, she didn’t know I was learning these songs, and throwing time and energy at a solo hobby, callusing and strengthening my fingertips alone in my room does nothing to strengthen the bond in real life. 

It’s the same kind of thinking that convinces me that a Spotify dating app could match me with my musical soulmate, or that I can and should be friends with the people whose Spotify Wrapped looks like my own. Shared musical taste is a nice way to start a conversation, but it can’t stand in for emotional connection.

Still, I have to believe it stands for something. 

In “Scott Street,” the fifth track on the Stranger in the Alps album, Bridgers sings about running into an old flame in her old neighborhood. They have an awkward exchange: 

I asked you, “How is your sister?
I heard she got her degree.”
And I said, “That makes me feel old.”
You said, “What does that make me?”

I asked you, “How is playing drums?”
You said, “It’s too much shit to carry.”
“And what about the band?”
You said, “They're all getting married.”

The characters in the song have spent time apart, growing independently and establishing their own lives, so that when they reconnect, it’s a lonely conversation. It’s stiff and fumbling. The outro, which goes on for minutes, repeats, “Anyway, don't be a stranger.”

I think of these lyrics all the time. How easy it is to lose touch, how flippant we are in telling each other to remain superficially close. I think of two people, twice thwarted in love by a pandemic and bad timing, separated by an expanse of land and three time zones. I think of building my new life in a new place, hooking up with new people, letting my hair grow out, the purple long gone.

Despite all that, or maybe because of it, I hold these songs closer, play them even more. As if repetition will make me less of a stranger. As if the music I love will give me a glimpse of the people who love it too.

Fortnightly Faves

1. This Op-Ed “Can We Really Love Our Children Unconditionally?” which my parents drew my attention to…and which I loved.

2. Kate Lindsay’s essay, “Instagram Is Over” which I resonated with even though I have trouble quitting the platform.

3. The second half of NY Mag’s Podcast Power Trip, which came out in March, but I lost momentum while they were on hiatus. Lots of dirt on the psychedelic underground and aboveground—was worth coming back to even though it took me forever to get around to it!

4. This gripping NYer about a murder in the gravel cycling universe and what it reveals about the cycling culture in which it occurred. I was hooked.

5. Calling a friend I haven’t talked to in way too long. Let this be your sign to do it!