How to Pick Songs for a School Magazine: One Teacher’s Playlist
The student editor caught me between second period and morning break, a tablet in one hand and a granola bar in the other. “We need song recommendations for the magazine,” she said. “You know, fun stuff. Something that won’t get us a lecture.” This was the same editor who had rejected a poem the week before because the rhyme felt “too obvious,” so I knew she was serious.
I paused because I had done this before. In previous years I had gone with the Top 40 playlist, and by the time the issue came out the tracks sounded dated and a bit plastic. Another year I listed “great albums” and the magazine looked like a music department brochure. Then there was the year we asked the student team to contribute, and one member suggested a song with a chorus that could not be printed. The music teacher read it out at staff meeting, and that was that.
So when this editor asked me, I made up a different rule. What songs could you play at a school event, in a family car, and through a student’s headphones without anyone needing to hit skip? Songs with clear language, a solid structure, and something that gives the reader a little relief in the middle of exam season.
The criteria sound obvious, but they take a while to tune. A song like “Mr Blue Sky” by Electric Light Orchestra gets into the magazine because it has a bounce that drags a tired classroom along with it, and the lyrics can be read as a weather report or a mental-health message. It is positive but not forced. It does not matter that it is old. Teenagers do not care about the release date if a song feels good in their ears.
I gave her ten suggestions in the end. Not all were cheerful. Not all were classics. But each one had passed the “car test” — whether I could imagine a student’s mother or father and a grumpy sibling staying quiet for the whole four minutes without reaching for the dial.
“Lean on Me” by Bill Withers is the one I put at the top. It was written after a family tragedy, and the tune sits in that place between sad and hopeful. The lyrics are plain, and that is why they last. A student reading a full page of poetry can hear it, hum it, and understand it without homework.
Then I added “Three Little Birds” because the reggae bass line works as a physical reset, and the message is not about ignoring problems but about not letting them take extra space in your day. Bob Marley records sometimes crop up in issues about protest or history, but this one can show up in a magazine next to a feature about mock exams and still feel right.
I suggested Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” with caution. It has been listed in almost every school magazine since the 1990s. But I defended it because it was the only song on the list that explicitly believes the world is good without ignoring that people are messy. It has a line about friends shaking hands, which is basic and easy to mock, but it can get through to a student who is quietly worried about the future.
For something with a slightly different mood, I wrote down “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. It has a spoken intro and a duet, so it breaks the structure of a usual pop song. It sounds a bit homemade and scrappy, and that makes it more honest for a school magazine than overproduced radio tracks. A Year 9 might find it strange; a Year 12 might find it charming. Either way, it starts a conversation about what “home” means, which is useful for an issue about leaving for college or moving schools.
I also included “Try a Little Tenderness” by Otis Redding, because the trumpet punches in and wakes up a reader, and because the title is a real piece of social guidance that does not need to be explained. I included “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” by Baz Luhrmann because it is not a song in the usual sense — it is a spoken essay set to a backing track. It is perfect for magazine culture because it should be read as well as heard. I told the editor that if the words look too simple, that is the point.
A couple of left-field choices: “Everything Stays” from the animated show Adventure Time, which is a short, quiet ukulele song that many students know and many parents do not, and “Wide Open Spaces” by the Dixie Chicks, which is about leaving home and watching the scenery change. It has a literal folk-country structure that makes the issue feel warmer, not louder.
Finally, I wrote down “Mr Blue Sky” at the number ten spot. I told the editing team to wrap the list with it, because if they printed the songs in the back section, the last line of the magazine could feel like the first sunny day of spring.
The editor scanned her notes. “These are all kind of…” She looked for a word. “Old? No, not old. Soft. Will people mind?”
I said that a soft song is not a weak song. A soft song is one that still has its arms open. The school magazine goes home with a student at the end of term, and might be read by a grandparent on a Sunday. It might be thrown on a desk and found two months later during a clear-out. The songs need to survive that kind of distance. They cannot be perfectly current — that dates them before the issue is even printed. They need to be familiar enough to catch attention and odd enough to make a reader glance at the list twice.
The issue came out two weeks later. The list was there, in small text at the end of the features section, with a QR code that opened a shared playlist. Responses were mixed, honestly. One student wrote to the editor saying the list was “grandma-core.” A few others asked for the playlist to be put up in the common room. One teacher said the “Three Little Birds” mention made her hum it during an afternoon detention, which she described as a kind of miracle.
I did not expect much else. The magazine job was never to hand a group of teenagers the definitive soundtrack to their lives. It was to give them a starting point and let them argue. The editor asked me if she should do a follow-up next term with songs for a summer exam season. I said we could talk about it after results are out.
That seems right. The list is not perfect. It is weighted toward songs that have already been aged and tested, and it stays away from the fresh, raw, complicated music teenagers will always find first. But a school magazine cannot keep up with that. It can only offer a few durable songs that hold up across the ages—and hope that a student reads them, presses play one afternoon, and wonders who else has heard them.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » How to Pick Songs for a School Magazine: One Teacher’s Playlist