A few years ago, I would pop onto a website called turntable.fm, where you could pick a cute little avatar to represent yourself in a room and choose to either be a DJ and play music for the room or just vibe as a listener. As a DJ, you could pick from songs from an existing catalog or upload your own, which made the service popular with DJs like Diplo. With each song, every person in the room had the option to vote on whether or not they liked the song, a form of instant feedback.

After growing up in a house with a lot of rules and spending little time outside of it, I found myself loving the idea of not having commitments. Without commitments, any chunk of time is for whatever I want. My whims can choose where the time goes. Not anyone else, except for me. Even as I work a full-time job, I wonder what it would be like to find a more autonomous gig, where I wouldn’t even be bound by location or 9-5 expectations.

I spent a lot of summers listening to deeply depressing music by Sufjan Stevens, Frank Ocean, and The Antlers, among others. For the brightest months of the year, I would be buried under a cloud of sad. Eventually, I graduated high school, and started to find more joy in my summers (I made some friends!). Classic summer music suddenly was more appealing than ever, and I got into the habit of making summer playlists to announce my love of the sound.