The Playlist Was Always a Self-Portrait

What dozens of artists chosen entirely by feel revealed about the man I was becoming

I was nineteen years old, sitting in a 1985 Toyota Celica, when I put in a CD and felt something move through me that I didn’t have words for.

The band was The Posies. The album was Frosting on the Beater. And the feeling — the only honest description I have — was electricity. Not excitement. Not enthusiasm. Something more physical than that. Energy coursing through my body that I could barely hold inside the car.

I didn’t analyze it. I didn’t think about what it meant.

I just felt it.

Thirty-five years later, “Definite Door” still gives me goosebumps. Every time.

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That was thirty-five years ago. I have been choosing music the same way ever since.

Not intellectually. Not through critical frameworks or genre categories or the recommendations of tastemakers. I choose music the way you choose a direction to walk when something in you already knows where you need to go. By feel. By the body’s response before the mind catches up.

What I didn’t understand — what I couldn’t have understood at nineteen — is that my body was doing something my mind wasn’t consciously authorizing.

It was writing a self-portrait.

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I’ve spent recent weeks looking at the full map of my musical obsessions. Dozens of artists across six decades. The Beatles through Parcels. Jellyfish through Tame Impala. Pedro the Lion through Dope Lemon.

On the surface the list is scattered. Hip-hop next to power pop. Art rock next to ambient Australiana. Jeff Buckley next to Ben Folds Five.

But something consistent runs underneath all of it, and it has nothing to do with genre.

Every single artist I have ever truly loved leads with melody as a moral commitment. Every one of them is emotionally unguarded. Every one of them is, in some register, asking the biggest questions — about faith, doubt, consciousness, what it means to be a self. Not one of them performs toughness. Not one of them is closed.

I did not curate this. I felt my way here. Which means the formation was happening below the level of intention — at the level where the most lasting formation always happens.

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Here is the part that is harder to sit with.

I have never been a lyrics-first listener. I don’t sit with liner notes. I don’t parse meaning line by line. I engage with music the way you engage with weather — you don’t analyze it, you feel it move through you.

And yet when I map what my ears have chosen over thirty-five years, the picture that emerges is startlingly coherent. Spiritually searching. Emotionally unguarded. Bittersweet as a default register. Drawn consistently to men who refused to perform toughness, who bled on record, who asked real questions about God and doubt and the nature of the self.

My body was tracking something my conscious mind never directed it toward.

The playlist was registering the truth of my interior life — faithfully, patiently, in real time — while my mind was occupied with other things entirely.

That is the thing about formation. It rarely announces itself. It happens below the waterline. You look back years later and realize the shape of what was being built, and you didn’t see it coming because you were never looking directly at it.

Which raises the harder question: what was being built, exactly? And what was it being built against?

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There is a version of masculinity most men of my generation were handed that would have found all of this deeply suspicious.

Not just the tears. The whole orientation. The choosing, over and over, artists who were openly searching. Men who bled on record. Music that refused to resolve its own ache into something tidier and more manageable. The script we inherited had a name for that kind of sensitivity, and it wasn’t a compliment.

Toughness. Competence. Self-sufficiency. Emotional closure as a sign of maturity rather than a symptom of fear.

I couldn’t have told you at nineteen that I was pushing back against that script. I just knew that Frosting on the Beater felt true in a way I needed more of. My body voted, repeatedly and without apology, for something the script would not have approved of.

Here is what I understand now that I couldn’t then: the script wasn’t just limiting. It was building a specific kind of man — closed, defended, unreachable — and calling it strength. My ears, without any instruction from me, kept refusing the materials.

The thirty-five years of choices, made entirely by feel, were building someone else. I just couldn’t read who yet.

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This past October I stood at Red Rocks Amphitheatre and watched Parcels play as the Colorado sky went dark behind the stage.

I am 54 years old. I have lived enough to know the difference between a feeling you perform and a feeling that moves through you before you can stop it.

During much of that show I was in tears.

Not from sadness. From fullness. From joy. From the specific overwhelm of feeling more than a body can hold. The music moving through me the way it always has, below the level of language, below intention, in the place where the real accounting happens.

And not a trace of shame in it.

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The most revealing autobiography I have ever written has no words in it.

It is a playlist. Assembled over thirty-five years. Chosen entirely by feel.

What has been true about you for a long time that you haven't yet given yourself permission to claim?