Songs We Left Unsaid
April 25th, 2025
Writer: Grace Gingold
Editor: Sophie Graff
Imagine a world where words are replaced not by silence, but by something equally profound: a Spotify Blend playlist name.
Let me set the scene. A Spotify Blend is an algorithmically generated playlist that merges the musical preferences of two people. It seeks common ground between their discographies and transforms it into something entirely new. That’s the beauty of it—a shared sonic experience, an unspoken dialogue of melody and meaning.
It surpasses any dating app. Because music is more than just sound, it is a lens into the soul of the listener.
On a dating app, attraction is distilled into superficial glances—a swipe left or right, maybe a sarcastic prompt thrown in for personality. But a Blend? It offers a different kind of compatibility test. One that is visceral, immersive, and deeply telling.
When you think of someone, you don’t scroll through their texts—you listen. You add a song you believe they’d love to the blend, the modern equivalent of a mixtape, except this one is curated by forces beyond our comprehension.
This past summer, a boy and I spoke on nearly every platform. Not email—let’s not get dramatic—but reels, texts, snaps. That was our rhythm.
And then, we made a Blend.
Spotify told us we were a 91% match. I’d never had such a high score with anyone before.
As words began to fade on other apps, all that remained was a single channel of communication: the name of our shared playlist.
For weeks, we conversed through shifting playlist titles—expressing feelings, recounting our days, and closing the distance through carefully curated words. Eventually, the messages brought us back to each other.
At one point, I was sent an entire playlist, the titles arranged meticulously into a message:
"Are You Free" (The Mother Hips)
"Friday" (Rebecca Black)
"I’d Like to Walk Around in Your Mind" (Vashti Bunyan)
"And So It Goes" (Billy Joel)
"Let’s Watch the Sun Go Down" (Daytona)
"Let’s Go Swimming" (Palace)
"Nightswimming" (R.E.M.)
And they say chivalry is dead.
Would I recommend all those songs individually? Not exactly. But the gesture— the orchestration of it— is undeniably romantic.
There’s something inherently intimate about sharing music. It mirrors life itself—people enter and exit, leaving echoes behind. Every person we meet gifts us with some kind of lesson, a piece of ourselves we haven’t yet discovered.
A single song can linger in your library, opening the door to an entire genre, a new world to explore.
And what’s even more remarkable? The songs we listen to—ones with thousands, even millions of streams—are being played by someone else at this very moment. We exist in parallel, unknowingly synchronized with strangers. The person sitting next to you, earbuds in, might be listening to the same song and feeling the same emotions.
Music reminds me of sonder—the quiet realization that every passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.
And yet, no two people perceive a song the same way.
Take Phoebe Bridgers’ cover of Fake Plastic Trees. Radiohead sings, "She looks like the real thing." While I may prefer the original, her rendition made me hear the lyrics differently—feel them differently. That must be true of all music. Maybe you focus on the bassline, while I fixate on the gentle, repetitive drumbeat in the background.
It’s like life—our focus is never the same. Some things are sharp, clear in our vision, while others blur into the periphery.
I often wonder what the artist originally intended for their song. Take Mazzy Star’s Fade Into You—I could play it again and again, never quite hearing the end because I always need to hear the beginning once more. "I want to hold the hand inside you." The song unravels into a meditation on seeing both nothing and everything in someone at once. I imagine most listeners project their own romantic encounters onto it—the fleeting glances, the fantasies of strangers who, one day, become something more.
That’s life, isn’t it? Falling in love with the unknown. Embracing the madness of it all. Love is Mazzy Star, Fiona Apple, Jeff Buckley, Radiohead, New Order.
And Foreigner asks, "I want to know what love is?"
Maybe love is when you stop questioning it.
But just the same, we all interpret things differently.
Jeff Buckley once said in an interview:
"How do you want to be remembered?"
"As a good friend… I don’t really need to be remembered. I just hope the music is remembered. Even though I’ve heard a whole bunch of music from so many places, and fallen in love countless times with all kinds of music, there’s still something—" he pauses, "I guess it’s just called freedom."
Perhaps that’s what music gives us.
Perhaps that’s why it lingers.
The last playlist title we shared?
"Lover, You Should’ve Come Over."
