By: Jane Tabet-Kirkpatrick
The end of the world (New Year's Eve in 2022, featuring the author and a friend).
The kick-off to December and unofficial signifier that the end of the year is approaching has become the annual drop of Spotify wraps and Apple music round-ups. This new technological tradition reminds users of the music that has marked their year. Each person gets a personalized playlist of the top songs they listened to throughout the year. This tradition ripples through the internet in various ways—people rushing to share their top songs of the year, some vying for the most niche taste, or some proudly claiming their citizenship to certain fandoms. Some people share that they listened to 269,000 minutes of music, and some boast that they only listened to “background noise for sleep” playlists.
My wrapped this year wasn’t shocking. My top artists were Taylor Swift, Florence and the Machine, and Noah Kahan— a pretty standard trio. I don’t say that pejoratively; I proudly stand with my music preferences. Yet, I feel that my Spotify Wrapped didn’t fairly encompass my year. Yes, I listened to a lot of pop music and a lot of the same song over and over again, but underneath that there was a lot of music that got swept under the rug and deserves to be fairly represented. I am curating my own playlists of songs that represent each month for me. They showcase what this year has been like in a more or less honest rendition of the Diary of Jane.
Y tú bailabas y no sabías
Que el mundo entero se destruía
Que al veros juntos, por un segundo, en lo más profundo
Fue el fin del mundo
The first time I heard this song was in a small apartment in La Laguna, Tenerife. The outside of my friends’ apartment was canary yellow, with giant windows that opened to the gray-scale rainbow of cobblestone down below. The rambunctious noise that follows teenagers around as they galavant the streets mixed in with our apartments Nochevieja—New Year’s Eve—party. We shouted sloshed greetings from the rooftop to the pretty girls down below. All of this while the grapes cooled in the fridge, waiting to be consumed at midnight. One of my friends from Murcia prophetically queued this song.
In that moment, dancing to this song around that apartment, drinking wine out of mugs and plastic cups while lighting cigarettes out the open window, art intertwined perfectly with the present. This song delivered a rush of emotions that conveyed, connected, and transcended that exact moment in time, catapulting me into a deeper feeling of gratitude and the memories I get to have in the world. I had about 7 more months of my year on the island and maybe the world was ending, but we were crying, laughing, singing, and dancing. The end of 2022, fue el fin del mundo.
February: Something in the Orange– Zach Bryan
Where the hell am I supposed to go?
I poisoned myself again
Something in the orange tells me you're never coming home
February, for being the shortest month, was an emotional shit show. I began the year by seeing Florence and the Machine in Leeds then immediately traveling to Fulbright’s Mid-Year Seminar in Pamplona, Spain. I gave a presentation to over 200 people about New Mexico. My grandfather died and I couldn’t attend the funeral. Carnaval descended onto the island and I became lost in a series of nights that turned into days and days that turned into weeks.
There was a lot I was doing and a lot more I was missing. The grief and excitement mixed in me like a strange cocktail. The emotional whiplash was enhanced by my distance from home. I listened to this song throughout this year and month, but I most significantly remember watching a sunset as I boarded an early morning flight from Leeds back to Tenerife. The sunrise was bright orange. I had shared an Uber with an Irish girl to the airport after we both made an unsuccessful 3:00 AM trek to the train station to try and use the airport shuttle.
Something in the orange tells me you’re never coming home. This month felt jet set and intense and like I would never be home.
March: The Blonde – TV Girl
It's just unearned admiration
Are you sick of all the stares?
You don't need to hide yourself away
You only need to dye your hair
I dyed my hair blonde.
The way I am, not strong enough to be your man
I try, I can't stop staring at the ceiling fan and
Spinning out about things that haven't happened
Breathing in and out
This is the month that I took the LSAT, so this song is self-explanatory. During the two-week break for Semana Santa, I spent my time studying in my room. The walls of my room were clean and bare, while the night stand next to my bed told the true story of chaos. On top was a half glass of wine, three half-melted candles, an empty birth control sleeve, clipper lighters, piles of receipts for Kinder Buenos, and approximately 60,000 euros worth of 5 cent monedas.
I started dreaming of logical reasoning questions and reading passages that would move across the page as I tried to chase down the words. Nightmares ensued about sections being added that I never studied for, that I had forgotten the time my test started or that I had to take it in Spanish. To make matters worse, the time of year couldn’t have been more beautiful in Tenerife. The winter jackets were officially shedded and the days were getting longer, brighter even. Throughout my studying, my only respite was five students that I was tutoring on the side. They offered some human connection and helped me realize that my life (might) be bigger than the LSAT.
I played this song on the bus while traveling back and forth between tutoring sessions. I did the whole “depressed and pensive on the bus” bit. I tried to imprint the images of ever-green hills with the ocean peaking in and out from behind the valleys of forest into my mind while humming a mantra, always an angel, never a god. Take the LSAT kids, it will make you understand sad music in a much more intimate way than before.
That fire you ignited
Good, Bad and undecided
Burns when I stand beside it
Your light is ultraviolet
May was fun. My teaching was essentially over and I was hanging out in Europe for a couple of months, biding time until I returned to “real” life. This song was reintroduced to me and it’s not even from a real band. It is a fictional band from the beloved romcom Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging.
May felt like a romcom. The start of summer burst onto the streets with vast amounts of kinetic energy that had been building all winter. Love was in the air, plans were being made and birds were being born. Everything felt romantic and silly. May felt like falling in love again or like light is ultraviolet.
June: Hotline Bling – Drake
Cause ever since I left the city, you
Started wearing less and goin' out more
Glasses of champagne out on the dance floor
Hangin' with some girls I've never seen before
I spent the month of June in a blur, touring parts of Europe with my cousin, Jena. In a club we somehow choreographed on the spot a pretty good dance to Hotline Bling. I ran myself ragged from London to Amsterdam to Dublin to Galway to Barcelona and back to Canarias. By the time we ended our trip back in my apartment in La Laguna, Jena and I were so tired we basically slept for two entire days. The other stories of those travels remain in secret oral tradition only.
July: Monster – Nicki Minaj
Pull up in the monster, automobile gangsta
With a bad bitch that came from Sri Lanka
Yeah, I'm in that Tonka, color of Willy Wonka
You could be the king but watch the Queen conquer
July was spent basking in my last moments of my year abroad, squeezing out the last bits of memories to be made. Pasé el tiempo en la playa. On one of these excursions to a hidden beach, I watched two of my best friends try and rehearse Nicki Minaj’s verse in Monster, with the most memorable lyrics being a tie between so lemme get this straight, wait I’m the rookie? and pink wig thick ass give ‘em whiplash. This time on the beach was so inspirational that I dedicated an entire week to committing the verse to memory.
Marcelo paseó por el Hierro
Comiendo quesadilla con su abuelo
Luna que es de Fuerteventura
Baña el mojo hasta las aceitunas
I left Canarias in August. One of the hardest goodbyes. Over the course of my farewell I grasped at all the things that I had taken for granted. The small grocery store trips to the corner market, the monedas that I had slowly collected on my night stand, or the walks through the dog park. The Hiperdino that was reliably open (but never on Sunday) became an almost staple in my life. However, I didn’t know that the store chain had a theme song until I was in my last couple of weeks in Canarias. I found it refreshing that there were still things to be discovered in Mis Islas Canarias, donde se unió el mar y la montaña.
September: Fear and Fridays Poem– Zach Bryan
Yeah, I think fear and Fridays got an awful lot in common,
they're overdone and glorified and they always leave you wantin'
I started working 40 hours a week about three days after I returned from being abroad. It was a culture shock of a different kind. I was tired and also trying to cope with starting law school applications. This poem and entire album were the thesis for my homecoming. I spent a lot of time being pensive about my year abroad, and in some ways September kind of acted like a marker as the beginning and end of an era of my life.
October: October Passed Me By – girl in red.
I keep the letters that you wrote in a secret place
Every now and then, I go down memory lane
October passed me by just like any month
But I still think of the times you took the breath out of my
Lungs
My birth month brought a lot of nostalgia. I was twenty-three and moved back into my parents house. My life had finally slowed down a bit from my travels and I had time to rest and contemplate life. I started applying to law school in September and had to start examining the foreseeable future. There was so much thinking in October and reflecting on the past and how that was going to build my future. Before I knew it was twenty-four and it was November. This song felt good to sing on the drive to work, screaming at the top of my lungs I love you my girl.
November: Waiting Room – Phoebe Bridgers
I wanna be the power ballad that lifts you up and holds you down
I wanna be the broken love song that feeds your misery
And I can wish all that I want, but it won't bring us together
Plus, I know whatever happens to me, I know it's for the better
November crept on me this year as the most stressful month. I made internal deadlines for law school applications that I had to push back because I had an unexpected APPENDIX BURST???
I listened to this song in the hospital, as nurses came in every four hours to check in on me. The hospital was cold and I was in varying levels of pain. Somehow listening to this song made the external pain internal—and maybe that felt better. I’ve always loved to feed my misery.
In my frustration with unexpected surgery that set back my initial plans, I had a suffocating amount of work to do for law school applications, my actual job, and planning future trips, all while also trying to maintain some sense of normalcy.
In my exhaustion I found comfort in sad songs, especially in November. It’s not just me falling apart right now, I thought. Know it's for the better, this song was on repeat again and again this month.
I feel nervous in a way that can't be named
I dreamt last night of a sign that read "The end of love"
And I remember thinking
Even in my dreaming
It was a good line for a song
Last year began with the end of the world and this year begins with the end of love. Without a doubt, Florence Welch is my favorite artist and that love has only grown through the course of this year. The End of Love is deceptively named, it sounds helpless and hopeless but the song is filled with the contrary. This year began with me thinking it was the end of the world, but a joyous one. This song fits within the same vein of that feeling. This year held a lot of loss, ecstasy, grief, and joy. It was a year of allowing the water to wash over me, on that included changing, ending love, starting again, and reminding myself to let it rush in, not wash away.
This next year feels distinct from the one that I started on that cigarette daydream night last year. Things can be flooded and chaotic, but they do not have to be destroyed because of it. We can go far in a year, we can even go to the end of the world and still come home. We can mourn our loved ones, dress in silly costumes while drinking warm Jager from water bottles, take shitty standardized tests, create homes out of white walls and messy nightstands in special pockets of the universe, and we can be reminded of it all by a good line in a song.
Part of me hates writing yearly reflections because I can’t avoid sounding cliche, but some things are simply true: life is wonderful and chaotic, a lot happens in a year, and even more will happen over the course of a lifetime. Just as music is a vehicle for nostalgia, years are a vehicle for life. It will continue to move through us reminding us to reflect, think, and begin again.
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