A couple weeks ago, Susan Storm asked me to write an article about songs that INFJs love. When I asked some INFJs on Facebook for feedback on that topic, I was overwhelmed by the responses. It was far more than I could fit in just one article! I’ve compiled a Spotify playlist with the recommended songs, albums, and artists that you can click here to listen to. It’s over 6 hours long, and growing with each new comment. I’ve found several new favorites, and I hope you will too!
Coincidently, I finished writing this article shortly before I finished listening to Jordan Peterson’s “Maps of Meaning” lecture series. In the final lecture, he spends a few moments talking about music.
“Virtually everyone gets intimations of meaning from music. And I think music is hierarchically structured patterns that are representative of being laying itself out properly. … It is an abstract representation of proper being.” — Jordan Peterson, 2017 Maps of Meaning 12, time signature 1:51:00.
Music is meaningful to us on a level that I doubt most of us (me included) really understand, at least consciously. And, in the case of many of the songs INFJs list among their favorites, it really does prompt us to think about “being.”
- We think about an ideal state of being, listening to hopeful songs like “I will Spend My Whole Life Loving You” by Imaginary Future.
- We encounter our own brokenness and resilience listening to “Elastic Heart” by Sia.
- We revel in the whimsey of different perspectives on the world through songs like “Whole of the Moon” by Celtic Woman.
- We face our darker, hidden, hurting sides and think about how others may respond as we listen to “Demons” by Imagine Dragons.
Some of these songs represent irrepressibly hopeful ideas of the world, while others dive deep into brokenness and pain. Some are raw, some are happy, some beautiful, some hard to listen to. But for at least one INFJ out there, the different songs on this playlist are expressing the sorts of things “which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent” (to quote Victor Hugo).