At this point, it’s cliche to say that 30 is the age many young people idealize as the time when they’ll have everything figured out, but when you finally reach that point, you realize no one actually knows what they’re doing. In the movie 13 Going on 30, the main character can’t wait to grow up to be “30, flirty, and thriving,” until she is magically transported to the future and ends up disappointed by her own selfishness and how shallow her life is. I sometimes wonder what my 13-year-old self would think of my life if she could see me now. I think she’d be amazed that I met my boyfriend and many of my best friends at a Fall Out Boy show. I think she’d love my hot pink hair. She might be disappointed that I haven’t achieved more career-wise, and that I’m still not sure if I want to have kids. Above all, I know she’d be proud of my ability to create a community and start over in a new city every few years — the way I’ve managed to have wild adventures while staying grounded and true to myself.
I’m thinking of this as my eras playlist, containing 30 songs representing my 30 years on Earth so far. These are songs I’ve loved over the course of my life and have stood the test of time. This playlist truly has everything — my teenage emo phase (that wasn’t really a phase) featuring Fall Out Boy and Mayday Parade, connecting with my roots as a Mexican-American with artists like Selena, going for long New Mexico drives with my two best friends listening to Maggie Rogers and Silvana Estrada, crying my eyes out in my lonely D.C. apartment to Waxahatchee and Paramore, and finally, building a wonderful community in Chicago while rediscovering the music I loved as a kid.
In the past few years, I’ve been lucky to experience many full-circle moments with bands I’ve loved for a long time. There’s something about seeing a band’s 10-year anniversary tour for a favorite album while having flashbacks to the original tour a decade ago that makes one feel, well, old. It’s also pretty magical though, screaming along to all those sad songs and realizing that while we may still have our struggles, in many ways we’ve made it through. This was the case for me with Mayday Parade and their self-titled album that I saw live in both 2013 and 2023 with my oldest concert buddy, who I also attended my first Vans Warped Tour with at 13 years old. Singing along to “When You See My Friends,” especially with my best friend, will always be healing to me — the line, “Were you honest with yourself / every version of yourself?” just hits different at 30, with so many more versions of myself contained inside of me.
Warped Tour, for all its flaws, awakened in me a deep and unshakeable love of live music. There’s a direct throughline I can draw from attending my first Warped Tour to 15 years later flying from D.C. to Chicago on a whim, waiting in line for 14 hours without a ticket hoping to see Fall Out Boy at the Metro — which eventually led to me moving to Chicago with a guy I met in line at that show (now my wonderful boyfriend). It would be an understatement to say the Fall Out Boy Metro show in 2023 changed my life, so “Love From The Other Side,” the first song they played at that show, will always have a special place in my heart.
Before I could get to the Metro and start my life in Chicago, I first had to survive college. It was a dark time — I spent a year listening exclusively to sad, intellectual indie music to impress the guy I liked at the time (shout out to Father John Misty). More importantly, some lovely college friends introduced me to SZA’s music, which I am still obsessed with to this day. I included “20 Something” on my playlist because it feels like the perfect song to listen to while honoring the messy, joyful, bittersweet years of my twenties, and “F2F” because I think it’s the closest SZA has ever come to releasing a pop punk song. I’m still crossing my fingers for a potential collaboration between her and Paramore.
Speaking of Paramore, they were the first female-fronted band that I fell in love with. You’ll notice that among 30 songs, two-thirds are female or non-binary artists or bands fronted by women — this is very much intentional. I love my emo dudes with all my heart, but over time, I started to gravitate towards music made by women that more accurately reflected my lived experience. This led me to turn a bit away from my pop punk roots in my early twenties and towards more indie and pop genres with artists like Maggie Rogers, Samia, and Lorde (all of whom I still adore). My goal for this next year is to dive into more bands who are female- and non-binary-led within the genres of alternative and pop punk — bands like Beach Bunny, Annie DiRusso, Winona Fighter, and Sinceer Engineer, who feature heavily in the last half of my playlist. If you have recommendations, please send them my way! You know where to find me (lurking on the Honorable Mention Magazine Instagram account…).
I’ve included a few more honorable mentions (heh) from my playlist below, so you can skip around depending on your mood:
Songs with political undertones to have an existential crisis to:
- “Holy Shit” by Father John Misty
- “All My Exes Live In Vortexes” by Rosie Tucker
Songs for engaging in some light misandry:
- “Someone Tell The Boys” by Samia
- “Weeds” by Beach Bunny
Songs to self-sabotage to:
- “Look At Miss Ohio” by Gillian Welch
- “F2F” by SZA
Songs for healing from self-sabotage:
- “Fire” by Waxahatchee
- “Cranes In The Sky” by Solange
- “Back In My Body” by Maggie Rogers
- “I Wanna Get Better” by Bleachers