Heroes Not Zombies

I wrote about music in my life a while back and mentioned the record club which my friends and I created at school. I grew up in Stirling, Scotland, under the presence of the magnificent castle you can see in this photo. In fact, I was born in Stirling, which my gran always told me made me “a son of the rock”. There were a couple of dozen of us all lived within the same area and we spent our teenage years together but once those years were over we all went our separate ways. Off to different cities, different countries even. But recently four of us reconnected over the internet and that got me thinking about our record club again.

Do you use a music streaming service? Spotify perhaps? Or Apple or Amazon music? Well it turned out we all use Spotify so I created a shared playlist for us and called it “The Stirling Record Club”. We’ve been using it to share tracks which we all remember from our original record club days but we’ve also been introducing each other to music we’ve each discovered and come to love over the last 40 years (we’re all in our 60s now).

Each time one of us adds a track we send a group email telling the others about it and why we love it. That usually sparks a conversation and inspires us to share other related pieces. I’m loving it. The mixture of good memories, new discoveries, fun conversation and reconnection to some shared part of life is wonderful.

Last December my daughter, Amy, and I created a shared playlist on Spotify as an Advent calendar experience. We each shared one track every morning so there was a little gift of music for each other every day for 25 days. That was delightful and again the sharing of the music deepened connection.

So here’s my tip for you today. Create a shared music playlist with someone, or with several friends, and start to enrich and deepen your connections. What a bonus – the music is great too!