Ten Songs for the Rest of My Life

The ultimate test of one's playlist abilities.

Around the first week of December each year, our social media feeds become saturated with the results of our networks’ listening habits. Just a few short years ago, you had no way to know what song your cousin’s boyfriend listened to the most over the past 10.5 months.

In anticipation of everyone’s favorite minor privacy invasion, my friend Brendan posed a question to our group chat: if you had to choose just ten songs to listen to for the rest of your life, what would you pick?¹

This is a borderline impossible question to answer. A quick check of my Spotify likes shows me that I have saved 3,461 songs. Today alone, I saved 12 new songs, and this count doesn’t include the hundreds of classical and electronic songs I save to study/focus playlists.

The advent of streaming has been largely horrible for musicians, but a true boon to listeners. There are dozens of artists saved to my Spotify library that I am 100% sure I would have never heard of — let alone listened to — without the advantag…