By 
A few months ago my mother died. For a long time afterward, grief showed up whenever it felt like it—in line at the pharmacy; while I was crossing the street; standing in my kitchen on a Tuesday for no reason at all.
It wasn’t that I was avoiding it. It was that it had no shape—it was one enormous undifferentiated blob of sad, with no edges, and nowhere in particular to set it down.
Then a woman named Julie Slavin asked me a question I didn't think I could answer.
Slavin is a renowned New York City-based DJ (she goes by the name DJ Hesta Prynn) who trained under the musician Questlove. She is also a licensed family and marriage therapist, and she has found a way to combine those two wildly different disciplines in a uniquely powerful way. We were on a video call, and her mane of hair—almost the exact color of raspberry Kool-Aid—cascaded past her shoulders.
Then came the question, the one she asks everyone. What songs heal you? What reminds you of home? What songs make you think of your mom?
I told her I couldn’t really think of one, especially not one attached to my mom. “We are word people," I said.
And then, maybe four seconds later, I remembered the car.
In middle school, for almost an entire year, I used to “miss” the school bus so my mother would have to take me, and as we drove the three miles to school, we’d play Bette Midler’s “The Rose” over and over, trying to harmonize better and better each time. She drove me in her bathrobe but without visible irritation, which is surprising because I imagine I was making her late for work. And once that song bubbled up, so did the rest of the short playlist—the musical Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well… an album few people my age have heard of; Trio, featuring Dolly Parton; and a handful of other songs that remind me of her, and of our bond.
“You forgot it because you needed someone to ask you the question,” said Slavin. “And that’s what I do.”
A Song That Changed Her Mind
Slavin’s own path to unlocking the transformative power of music can be traced to an afternoon nearly a decade ago. She was eating a salad at a health food store when a lyric from Jay-Z’s album 4:44 made her reconsider her relationship to money and property ownership. Walking back to her building, she ended up in the elevator with a stranger who, it turned out, had owned an apartment there for 40 years and was on the verge of selling it. She saw it that same hour: 300 square feet, an unobstructed view of the East River, the original crystal doorknobs. Standing in the room, she said yes, and still owns it.
“That lyric changed me instantly from I can’t to what if I could," she says. It spurred on action and changed how she thought of herself.
What Slavin does, for the record, is not technically “music therapy,” a clinical discipline with credentialed practitioners, and she is careful not to stand in its light. She refers to her method as Music Connection Therapy, and a few weeks after we spoke I watched her demonstrate the premise in a conference room full of strangers.
She played a song and told us to close our eyes. “What’s coming up?” she asked. Then she had everyone turn to the person beside them and say where the song had taken them. The woman next to me had gone straight to the ’90s, and her older siblings’ CD collection. Someone behind us was in the backseat of a car.
Your brain binds memory, feeling, and time to a song, explains Slavin, which is why one bar can drop you into a particular place. Many of us just let it happen by accident, in the grocery store, on shuffle. But what if you can harness it?
“If a song can take you back,” she asked the room, “can you use a song to take you forward—to create change, to make decisions, to feel differently?”
Then she had us do an exercise. “Think of a win,” she said— “anything you decided to do and then actually did.” Moved to a new city. Got the job. Got the dog. Made a friend after 40. “Now turn to the person next to you and spend 45 seconds bragging about it, and if you’re the one listening, receive it like Beyoncé is standing in front of you.” There was a lot of noise. A man next to me had had an unexpected win at work.
This is the state you have to be in, says Slavin, to write down what you want. Most of us try to plan our lives from a flat, tired, autopilot place, and then wonder why the plans are so small.
Then comes the “homework.” You pick one area of your life and write down what you want, in the present tense, as if it’s already December and you’ve pulled it off. You rate where you actually are, one to 10. Then you write down everything standing in the way—she calls these excuses, and she has a whole taxonomy of where they come from, including the “chicken,” who is frightened; the “brat,” who doesn't feel like it; and the “weather reporter,” who explains that this is simply how things are. Then you make one promise small enough to actually keep, with a deadline attached, and a consequence that’s annoying but not harmful. I will write for two hours before eleven, or I'll throw a dollar into the street.
And then you put a song to it. “We have to hardwire our promises into our nervous system,” Slavin told us, and made the whole room stand up. “Think of your promise,” she said, “and repeat it 10 to 20 times over the song.” Do that, she says, and “you've built a new synapse—after which you don't have to think about the promise at all anymore. You only have to hear the song.”
Making Space for What You Feel
In the case of grief, on our Zoom call two weeks earlier, Slavin had asked me to create a space—an actual physical spot in my home, where I can give myself space to grieve while I’m listening to my playlist.
Build a “container,” she said—a space that I'd pair with a ritual. For some people, church or even a therapist’s office is that container. (So, in her hands, is a dance floor.) For others—like me!—it’s a tiny makeshift shrine on my dresser. Framed photo, figurine, jewelry items. The point is that it has borders.
Then make an appointment, says Slavin. “Put the song on, tell her what happened today, and then get up and go about your life.”
I had some objects already. I'd taken a small, lavender-stuffed eye-pillow in the shape of a rabbit from her bedroom, along with some jewelry and other figurines. The stuff has been sitting around, making me sad in a formless way, but now, placed together, it’s something.
And there’s my playlist, with a handful of songs right now. I carry the list around the way you'd carry a smooth stone in a pocket—something to reach for when I want her, instead of waiting for her to turn up unannounced in the pharmacy line.
By now I'd seen Slavin do this twice—to that room full of strangers and to me—and in both cases the raw material had been handed to her on the spot. She works this way one-on-one, and with companies, and now through an online “Inner U.” course she teaches once a month, and what people bring her is rarely grief. It's work, or money, or a marriage that's gone stale, or the gym they keep not going to.
Her own examples are reassuringly ordinary. To keep morning grumpiness from ruining whole days, she spent a couple of weeks picturing her husband at his most charming while playing "Magic Man" by Heart, until the song alone could do it; now when he's annoying her, she puts it on her phone. To get herself lifting weights at 40, she decided that in her basement gym she would listen to exactly one artist and nothing else, ever. Within a year, wanting to hear that artist meant wanting to work out, having to get to the gym.
A Soundtrack for Moving Forward
Eager to find out more, I called a few other women who’d done this work with Slavin.
Christie Marchese, 41, who runs a film distribution company based in NYC, went in openly suspicious. “I’m always skeptical of life coaches and fake therapists,” she told me.
The occasion she needed help with was an important meeting with someone senior to her. Marchese felt out of her depth. Slavin came to her office, and the two of them sat in a conference room and talked—though not about the meeting. They talked about the business, its mission, and where her confidence actually came from. At some point, Marchese expressed something she’d never quite put into words: I think I’m motivated by anger. As in, the specific fury she feels watching filmmakers get taken advantage of—her business basically exists to prevent this.
The playlist she built with Slavin, then, was built for exactly that. Pink, Paramore, Green Day, Linkin Park. "Happy, angry music," she calls it.
Nearly a year after that big meeting—which went off without a hitch—Marchese is still relying on that list to help her: while getting ready in the morning, while walking to work, sometimes before walking into a room she needs to feel "large" in.
Kathryn Minshew, 40, an entrepreneur in New York City, came at her meeting with Slavin from a different direction entirely. She ran a successful career resource platform for 12 years, left it, and then spent a long stretch afterward trying to work out who she was without that business. “I had done a tremendous amount of thinking and talking about it,” says Minshew, “all very head-based behaviors, for trying to feel unstuck. But sometimes language can only take you so far.” She describes that period as “walking forward in the dark toward a destination she kept assuming would get easier to see as she got closer.”
Then she went to a music connection event Slavin hosted, in a dim underground room in Tribeca, built around the new Madonna album. "I've been to concerts, I've been to clubs, I've been to therapy," says Minshew. "But I've never experienced those things brought together in this way." She left with something she described a little sheepishly, aware of how it sounds—as “an embodied confidence,” a feeling of “deep connection to the person she was becoming.”
Now she has a playlist with her name on it. Slavin built it and titled it "Kathryn in Flight," and it arrived near the end of a solo trip to Ladakh, a city in the Indian Himalayas, that had been a considerably more difficult journey than Minshew had planned. She listened to it on her last day there and again on the flight home. She still plays it, usually in the shower, to start the day.
The songs are mostly about leaving: Madonna's "Jump," George Michael's "Freedom! '90," Jessie Ware's "Free Yourself" — which Minshew describes as being about leaning into whatever makes you feel alive, and away from the things you're merely supposed to do. And then Florence + the Machine's "King," which is the one that really lands for her, about what she calls the sometimes Herculean task of being an ambitious woman in this world.
Internally, the playlist shifted what she thought she deserved. Externally, it showed up in conversations and negotiations—in what she asked for, and in whether the question running underneath was What do I actually want? or What do I need to do to get this?
“Change takes time, and there are no magical overnight silver bullets, much as we might wish there were,” she concedes. “Changing habits and thought patterns you’ve had for a long time isn’t easy at all. But I do believe this really is helping.”
It’s been less than a year since my mom died, so my own work is still unfolding.
What I do know is that “The Rose” still puts me in the passenger seat of my mother’s car, with her in that bathrobe and the two of us trying to harmonize. That was always there. I just didn't know it was something I could reach for on purpose—hearing and healing, all in one.
How to Make a Mental Health Playlist
1. Choose what you need. Identify how you want to feel or what you want to change. Maybe you're making space for grief, building confidence in dating, easing into a workout routine or finding motivation for a career change.
2. Start with a question. Ask yourself: When do I remember feeling this way? Maybe you felt confident playing on your high school softball team, or motivated when you first moved to a new city. What songs remind you of that time? You can even research the music that was popular during that period or in that place.
3. Notice what comes up. Play a few possibilities and pay attention to the memories or feelings they stir. Add the songs that resonate, whether they're inspiring, energizing or bittersweet.
4. Give the playlist a purpose. Use it for a specific moment or ritual: before a big meeting, on a walk or while spending a few minutes with a memory. Your playlist can serve as a personal pep talk, or giving yourself permission to cry to a meaningful song can help you make space for grief before returning to your day.
5. Make it easy to return to. Save the playlist somewhere handy. If you're working toward a goal, choose an anchor song and pair it with one small, specific promise to yourself. Return to that song to reconnect with your intention.
