For years, I lis­tened to music based on my mood. Playlists were well suit­ed for this. I had one full of sad songs for my sad days, days that would last months at a time. I had one with only quick-paced, aggres­sive gui­tar riffs and lung-spit­ting screams, for the pock­ets of rage I’d encounter every now and then. One that was most­ly elec­tron­ic inspi­ra­tion — songs that would move me when I need­ed to move. One for the par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult days, con­sist­ing of sto­ic melodies that could fill me with grit deter­mi­na­tion. There was even one for the bit­ter­sweet moments, per­fect for a post-show buzz. Every song served a par­tic­u­lar pur­pose.

This mot­ley group­ing of sin­gle tracks may have been the result of the way I dis­cov­ered new music. Tenaciously, with ears always open, I would record as much as I could that caught my fan­cy, jot­ting down any dis­cernible lyrics I could use as a basis for a search, and nev­er stop­ping until I could find the song. Hysteria, by Muse, is just one exam­ple, which I hap­pened to dis­cov­er while watch­ing an awards show. For a long time, it remained a song I’ve enjoyed on my for it’s sub­tle build-up, and ener­getic, near­ly chaot­ic, synth-inspired bass lines.

Things changed when I lived with Trolley. He exposed me to bands of dif­fer­ent gen­res, and being a musi­cal col­lec­tor, this expo­sure took the form of com­plete albums. One of them hap­pened to be Absolution.

Now that I have the entire album, Hysteria is known to me as track 7, com­ing after the pen­sive Interlude, but before the gen­tle, ethe­re­al, Blackout. In this con­text, pre­ced­ed and suc­ceed­ed by two equal­ly sig­nif­i­cant tracks, the song does­n’t sound the same.

Eventually, none of my playlists were appro­pri­ate for what I was feel­ing. At first, I thought that this was the result of increas­ing­ly sub­tle or com­plex emo­tions, but I’ve come to real­ize that it’s sim­ply because I’ve matured, and as a result, my emo­tions have evened out. With the wis­dom and seren­i­ty asso­ci­at­ed with grow­ing old­er, came the loss of emo­tion­al highs and lows that would inspire me.

Now it’s become dif­fi­cult to lis­ten to a song in a playlist. Every album has an order. Every track has its place. Listening to a song out of its musi­cal con­text may be hard, but lis­ten­ing to music with­out the rush of inspi­ra­tion is hard­er.

And this has become my musi­cal con­text.