About the Soundtrack

Short version: I make playlists, and I tell stories about why the songs belong together.

Songbird version: Music has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. The radio was always on when I was growing up, and there always seemed to be an album playing somewhere in the house. I started playing saxophone in the seventh grade, grew up in band rooms, became a music educator, played and sang with worship teams and choirs, and collected more playlists than any one person probably needs.

But The Songbird Soundtrack wasn’t a blog I planned to create.

I didn’t even realize it at the time, but the idea began taking shape around Advent in 2022, when I started sending a friend an email with a link to a Christmas Song of the Day. I told myself I could do anything for a month. Some days, I sent one song. Some days, I sent several, because restraint was not part of the assignment.

Those emails did more than fill an inbox. The songs brought back memories, helped me work through a few things, and drew me back to music during a season when I needed it. Somewhere along the way, I realized I had finally found a form of journaling I could stick with.

A musical one.

The Songbird Soundtrack came later, but the idea behind it was already there: choose the songs, follow the memories, and tell the story.

I’m a GenXer, so I still think of playlists as mixtapes — and every good mixtape tells a story. That’s what I’m doing here: creating soundtracks for moments that matter, memories that move us, seasons that shape us, and the bits of culture we’re still talking about years later.

Sometimes, the starting point is personal. Sometimes, it’s a holiday, a TV show or movie, a news story, or one lyric I can’t get out of my head. If a book, record, gift, or something else belongs in the conversation, I may share that, too. There will probably be trivia. There will definitely be an occasional rabbit trail.

The earliest Songbird playlists were considerably longer because, once I started finding relevant tracks, it was far too easy to just keep going.

Until everything came to a grinding halt, that is.

As it does, life happened. Long story short, I took a really long break from posting.

And when I decided to return, I wanted to streamline the process — and not get bogged down in 54-song playlists. So I gave myself some rules:

  • Each soundtrack always gets 13 songs. (Why 13, you ask? Nothing cosmic. It was the number I wore when I played Little League softball!)
  • I might mention other songs in the story, but they aren’t included in the soundtrack.
  • Each soundtrack includes only one song by any single artist.
  • Each soundtrack should include a mix of genres and eras, current music when it fits, and at least one less-obvious discovery.
  • In my mind, the songs have to build an emotional arc. There’s no room for filler, or for several songs doing the same emotional job.

Narrowing each soundtrack to 13 songs gives each soundtrack and the story around it a shape of its own. And it pretty much always requires the kind of difficult decisions no playlist-maker should have to face: cutting songs I love.

Read the story, play the soundtrack, or let one song lead you somewhere entirely different.

If you’d like the full, winding, gloriously overthought origin story, you can read Put Your Records On: Welcome to The Songbird Soundtrack.

I hope you’ll enjoy the music with me.

Because life deserves a soundtrack.