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Every December, Spotify drops its annual digital confetti cannon known as Spotify Wrapped, which is basically a data-driven personality test disguised as a marketing stunt. It tallies up your most-played songs, artists, genres, moods, and questionable emotional choices and hands them back to you like, “Here’s who you were this year, for better or worse.”
And this year? Spotify decided to inform me that my “listening age” is 79.
Seventy-nine.
I don’t know whether to be proud or mildly offended. That’s not even a gentle suggestion. That’s a full-on, “Ma’am, your taste in music predates color television.” Spotify looked at my playlists and said, “We think you’ve been attending concerts since the Hoover administration.”
But after the initial gasp and a moment of dramatic contemplation, I think I’m choosing pride. Because I listen to everything under the sun, and apparently the algorithm agrees. I’m just going to assume Spotify thinks I’ve collected an entire lifetime of genres and artists to fill my sound waves. And honestly? It’s not wrong. I have spent an entire lifetime wandering through the musical universe collecting sounds like seashells.
Here’s the truth: I’ve heard a lot. I listen like someone who lived through the swing era, the disco boom, the rise of boy bands, and the entire emo movement, even though I was not alive for all of those. I am, in fact, a woman with range.
But that’s what happens when you treat music like a buffet. You don’t just grab one thing and move on. You go back for seconds. And thirds. And a questionable combination of foods that should not be touching but somehow work beautifully.
My playlists? They’re basically personality quizzes at this point. If you want to understand me, scroll through my collection.
“Bubblegum Funk” is exactly what it sounds like. Bright, sugary, weirdly confident. Pure roller-disco energy. It’s the kind of soundtrack that makes you believe you could lace up skates, grow perfectly feathered hair, and glide through life like a woman who absolutely does not wipe out in front of teenagers. It’s sparkle and swivel and main-character confidence, like the universe handed you a mirror ball and whispered, “Here, babe — light up the room.” This playlist could belong to a 14-year-old girl or a 79-year-old woman who still dreams of Friday nights at the roller rink.
Then there’s “Mom Jeans”, which is soft, supportive, and aggressively comfortable all the way up to your ribcage. It lives right next door to the kind of dentist’s office that exclusively plays soft-rock hits from every era. It’s acoustic-ish, nostalgic, slightly stale in the best possible way. It’s banana bread on a Sunday afternoon while deciding whether to reorganize the pantry or surrender to HGTV. These are the songs you turn on during a minor identity crisis or anytime you need to feel held by the emotional equivalent of a plush recliner and a motivational poster of a mountain. It’s soothing. Predictable. Weirdly validating. It’s a whole vibe.
“Sweet & Sour Valentine” is for when your heart can’t decide if it wants to write poetry, or key someone’s car — metaphorically, of course. It’s the playlist for soft feelings, dramatic feelings, mildly unhinged feelings, and the self-awareness to laugh at all of it. Imagine candy hearts with trust issues. Love letters written in gel pen and then immediately ripped up. Equal parts swoon and chaos. Every version of you that shows up in February has a seat here.
“Broadway Baby” is for the inner theater kid who never left — she just started wearing sensible shoes and pretending she doesn’t rehearse her curtain call in the shower. This playlist is pure camp. Sequins everywhere. Chorus lines kicking like their rent depends on it. A rogue spotlight following you while you unload the dishwasher. It’s dramatic entrances at the grocery store and belting power ballads while boiling spaghetti. If you’ve ever accepted an imaginary Tony while holding a Swiffer, welcome home.
And then there’s “Belting Mix”, which exists solely to endanger my vocal cords. There is no casual listening here. This playlist does not care about your skill level, your pitch, or your neighbors. It demands commitment. It demands volume. It demands that you sing like your life is a season finale. It is pure, unapologetic catharsis. There is no casual listening to “Belting Mix”. You either commit or turn it off. Those are the rules.
So maybe Spotify isn’t saying I’m old. Maybe it’s saying my musical taste is expansive — because it is. You can’t live through all these versions of yourself without picking up a few hundred genres along the way. It’s emotional archaeology. You peel back one layer and find teenage you lying on her bedroom floor with headphones the size of dinner plates, decoding her feelings through lyrics. Another layer reveals the you who danced in the living room with a baby on your hip, soundtracking early motherhood with whatever kept you awake. Another layer shows the version of you who discovered blasting 70s yacht rock helps you power-clean the house.
It’s all there. The whole messy timeline of being human.
A 79-year listening age just means I’ve sounded out my feelings across generations. It means when I didn’t have language for what was happening inside me, music stepped in with a bassline and a lyric like, “Here, sweetheart — borrow this until you find your own words.”
It means my emotional timeline is eclectic. It means I’ve experienced joy in one decade’s sound and heartbreak in another. It means I carry memories inside chord progressions and entire seasons of life inside four-song loops.
It means I didn’t stay the same person.
And my music didn’t either.
Most people get a listening age of 23, which basically means, “Congrats, you like music made for people who still have the metabolism of a woodland creature.” Meanwhile, I have the range of a woman who has seen some things, learned some things, healed from some things, and still knows the correct hand motions to “Macarena.”
Seventy-nine is wisdom. Seventy-nine is freedom. Seventy-nine is absolutely zero concern for being cool. I am basically the musical equivalent of a grandmother who can two-step, recite every Bon Jovi lyric, and also rage to Halestorm.
How else do you categorize someone who listens to Broadway power anthems, disco grooves, sad indie boys with guitars, early 2000s pop, classical piano, 90s alt-rock, and the entire Encanto soundtrack all before lunch?
The algorithm did its best.
The more I sit with my “79,” the more I think Spotify might’ve stumbled into something it didn’t entirely understand. Maybe it’s not about age at all. Maybe it’s about the sheer sprawl of a life that’s needed every kind of soundtrack to make sense of itself. Maybe it’s about the way I’ve shapeshifted over the years, collecting versions of me the same way I collect songs: impulsively, lovingly, and without worrying too much about whether they all match.
And honestly? If all that adds up to “79,” then fine. Let it.
I’m a collected anthology.
And isn’t that kind of beautiful?
And weirdly validating?
And also vaguely hilarious?
Because tomorrow I might discover a new artist, fall down a rabbit hole of Icelandic synth-pop, or revive my 4th grade obsession with Vanilla Ice or 1940s swing bands. Next week I might be back in a Broadway phase or blasting something so chaotic Spotify has to recalibrate my entire profile.
I guess what I’m saying is: I’m still adding tracks. I’m still wandering into genres I didn’t expect to like. I’m still letting songs attach themselves to moments I didn’t see coming. My life keeps expanding, so of course my playlists do too.
Next year, who knows. Maybe I’ll throw Spotify off so badly it just gives up and shows a spinning wheel. Maybe it’ll come back with something even more dramatic like “Congratulations, you are musically 104.” Or maybe it’ll finally realize I’m not aging — I’m just expanding.
Rachel L. Richard is a small-town farm girl turned suburbanite, a delightfully irreverent optimist, Mrs & Mama, floppy dog ear scratcher, lifelong learner, channel surfer, wanderer, believer, occasional creative, out-of-practice musician, cupcake addict, book devourer, and lover of all people.
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