wisty playlists for your new year!
Wisteria writer Celeste Landry Hernandez curated two Spotify playlists to help you start your year off right. In the season of discovery and enacting New Year’s resolutions, we can together reflect on tender recollections– through music. We hope these playlists encourage you to reflect on the sound of your own past and the sound’s power to evoke memories we often forget that we have. -Suchi (@suchi__mane)
Here are some words from Celeste (@celestealejandraaa):
“I’ve been writing poetry since the third grade, and yet in recent years, I’ve developed a tendency of writing untitled poems, treating their names as afterthoughts. When it comes to playlists, though, it’s an entirely different story. I can pluck specific lyrics, phrases, and images and mold them into a title that reflects precisely what I want. At the beginning of the fall semester of this year, I wrote a poem about deja vu– specifically recounting the year 2008. A wonder year of sorts; back when I was seven years old, my imagination was a cloak I wore to soothe myself of the mundane pains of growing up in turbulence. That poem, like countless others, is nameless. Yet somehow, that feeling of nostalgia, of being transported back in time with the strum of a guitar, a citronella candle is where I got the inspiration to create the playlist una curita pa el alma (a band aid for the soul). Since I was a kid, the moment I plugged in my earphones, I was immersed in a world of my own creation and feeling. Curating this playlist, along with the cover art was a walk back into the past, meticulously choosing tracks that have been elixirs in moments of extreme emotion and tribulation. I found myself needing a compilation that cured a homesickness I’ve been unable to shake off since I landed in the US back in the summer of 2021.
Una curita pa el alma is about growing pains, the high tides of adolescence, the reluctance to depart from certain places and faces, and an impending doom that one may not be able to catch up to the ever-changing state of the world. Music has been a part of my world since I came out of the womb, some of my earliest memories involve a second generation iPod that rests atop a fridge– a sort of throne. I didn’t realize how much music serves as a source of healing and remedy for myself until the peak of the pandemic. Four months spent in a one bedroom apartment, a set of JBL headphones that acted as gold earrings I refused to take off. No matter the language or time, music has a way of connecting people across all walks of life. I’ve collected songs throughout the span of my life as if they were seashells, carrying them with me across every area code, every city, and dirt road. The cover art for the playlist is a collage of symbols that have brought me comfort over the past 20 years— the ocean, mountains, overcast skies and thunderstorms, stamps and beautifully foamed cappuccinos.”
“Baby face blues is a slightly more intimate project. The songs are plucked from my childhood and adolescence. Melodies and harmonies that transport me back to sleepless nights, bumpy bus rides to Ravi Bhawan, and birthday parties where I was passed out on the couch, waiting for my parents to scoop me up and take me home. Creating the cover art for this playlist was my favorite out of the two. As corny as it may sound, it was comforting to pick up the puzzle pieces of my younger years, and make a creative piece out of it. Manta rays, pupusas, camping bags, wai wai ramen, mint lemonade, and local fruit stands– all fragments of the past two decades that I’ve transformed into a setlist. No one ever warns you of the pangs of bittersweetness that creep when you least expect, the sentimentality that accompanies a scent or image that transports you six or ten years into the past. Baby Face Blues is an escape of sorts, a plea to regain innocence that can never be recovered, a wish to be a kid of yesterday.”
