Spotify Premium is a blessing. When you’re confined to just your Starred list for four weeks, you’re essentially forcing musical introspection.

You get to rediscover old favorites perfectly tailored to your taste, curated by the best possible person for the job: you, featuring tunes that you love, but lyrics that you can’t quite recall, even if you still remember the dance moves you created.

When I’m enjoying myself, the song I’m listening to will start to associate itself with the experience. It’s about the feeling a song evokes, even in the most seemingly mundane of experiences such as sitting in the back of a taxi, driving through a city lit up on a rainy night.

Each song brings back a past experience, an old meaning, but you’re older now, and appreciating and singing along in a slightly different way. You’re against a new backdrop, and the music is set to a different context.

Music turns a neighborhood job into a dance on a stage, or a fast pursuit on foot. It brings a party to life, but it also puts a baby to sleep. It gives you a reason to wake up, even if all you’re going to do is lie in bed for another hour, staring at the ceiling. It can be someone’s 24/7, a sign that you’re not alone, a coping mechanism, and something it’s perfectly okay to be addicted to. It jumpstarts a healing process after heartbreak, and makes your commute to work that much more bearable.

A bath becomes ten times more relaxing, a shower turns into a solo session and brings out the Beyoncé in you.

It speeds up your walk to class and gives your footsteps a rhythm.

It’s a source of nostalgia. The right playlist can bring you back to the summer of 2013. You can return to the Bahamas without the sand stuck in between your toes, even if there’s a blizzard raging outside. It is a soundtrack, an anthem, a theme song that gives depth and context to the scenes of your life.

Without it…a walk is just a walk. Driving loses its luster. You were sitting in the office going about your work, life narrated by moods that changed every four minutes or so. Then, after yanking your ear buds out, suddenly the soundtrack to your life is nothing but constant clacking of keys and ringing of phones.

My Starred playlist can be access here, if you’re interested!