We Have A Map Of The Piano

When it comes to music, I think all of us have a map in our hearts for plucking the songs that speak to us and the ones we send back into planet oblivion. For some people, it’s about the bass or the guitar strings that make the heartbeat of the song. Others look for the help of words to define the soundtrack to whatever marks the theme of their lives — the rush of new love or heartbreak, prosperity or decline, melancholy or exhilaration, death or life. Music sometimes finds its way to trace our roots, our lineage, our individuality and sometimes it is just a bump on a long road to getting to our identity — as something we’d never confess in public to have liked. (Grand Confession: I am still rooting for Dido’s come-back.)

And yet, when I think of what defines my carefully-curated, indispensable playlist , one that I've been listening to for what seems like an eternity, I'm stumped. There was a time when I ditched it for months at a stretch, living off borrowed music from my husband and friends, well until I heard something as shadowy as Muse’s Starlight play in a cafe at sunset which made me go, “Wow…I do miss my playlist.” My collection of music is eclectic, mostly R&B, indie, Sufi songs, electronic and alternative rock. These songs have been transferred from desktops to laptops to phone memory, synced to death… Jogging without my playlist is an ordeal, an uphill climb.

As an experiment, I decided to go without it for a while, opening my ears to new artists, unexplored roads and shoreless depths of sounds and moods. As a result, I watched my playlist grow and expand, ushering in new artists I’d never heard before like Arctic Monkeys, Interpol, Sona Mohapatra, Gurdas Maan…

But it goes without saying that my old playlist had already grown on me and could not be done away with.

Regardless of what’s mainstream or crowd-pulling, we all go through our own evolution in music. There are your all-time go-to jams and there is that music we grow out of — you know the kind you played to insanity in the backdrop of Math sessions and midnight conversations and that, perhaps, are definitive of a phase that you've let go. There is that music that profiles you. “Babe, don’t mind me saying this but your songs…they’re just so angry! Are you going through something?” Then, there are songs that you hate just cos you’re forced to listen to them with family and friends and every time you hear them, you wince a little. (I don’t think I can ever hear a Boney M song without pulling a face.) And then let’s not forget there are those songs and artists that you ignored on principle. But you end up accidentally hearing them on the radio and you can’t help but sing them in the shower, being sucked into the quicksand of their rage and popularity. [ “Is it too late now to say sorry?”]

I like the idea of having a constant playlist — of course it’s one that I’d never play at a party or in any gathering, for I know nobody would understand it. These songs probably didn't enjoy the same glory that songs today attract. Playlists today have a shorter shelf-life I think. If you get to hear that one song fresh out of the studio, chances are that you’ll join the millions of people screaming from the rooftops about it, share videos on social media… They’ll make for water-cooler conversations. They’ll pass through several filters, including the most-popular feminist filter, before it gets ingrained into pop culture. You’ll hear that one song in everybody’s playlist along with the noise surrounding it, until everyone tires of it and it vanishes altogether to be replaced by another scintillating chart buster.

My playlist, however, is in a fairly equitable ratio of greatest hits and obscure songs, equal parts hippy-happy and permission-to-bawl-your-eyes-out gloomy. I have no clue how I arrived at it and from where I hand-picked these songs. Maybe I didn't pick these songs after all. Their ratings picked it. Maybe, I hopped from one artist to the other with Amazon’s “You may also like….”. It’s also possible that I added some songs that I heard on my favourite shows as a way to retain their best moments with me. (Case in point: Grey’s Anatomy, One Tree Hill.) Perhaps I read a reference to a song in a novel and wanted to listen to it and it just stuck. Maybe, one day, I was on my way back home waiting in the bus-shelter for the rain to stop when a cute guy came by, smiled at me, and stood close enough for me to vaguely make out the words of the song playing on his Ipod. And it became a part of my playlist. It may as well have been made up of some of those songs that got circulated at the office. (Did someone say American Pie?)

There is no way of knowing what really makes up our playlists. But the taste of it, perhaps in all its nostalgia, is so sweet that there’s no running away from it. I may ignore them for a while in a ruse to class up my taste in music, to find the same rush and familiarity in new artists, but every time I come back to it, I fall in love all over again.

It goes without saying that we all have a map of the piano and nobody can take it away from us.

Do you update your playlist occasionally? Or do you take comfort in listening to the same songs over and over again? Can you figure out which songs make you tick instantly? I'd love to hear from you, readers.