Psalms Playlist

Written by Erika Castiglione

I used to love to make mix tapes. I can still remember getting my first dual tape player “boom box,” and a few years later, one with an actual CD player (I know I’m aging myself here). I used to make mix tapes for almost every occasion and for everyone I cared about (Danny still has the mix tape I made for him when we started dating). Since we are no longer back in the 1990s, I have traded mix tapes for playlists. I create playlists for seasons, for parties, for holidays, for times of joy, and times of lament, because as the Psalms series reminded us, music is an integral part of our lives and it weaves itself into our hearts and brains in a way that mere prose does not. While it may be hard to memorize the periodic table or a chapter of the Bible, it is almost effortless to learn the words of a song. 

Psalms were meant to be sung and I’m so thankful that many artists throughout the centuries have been setting our English-translated psalms to music. Here is a sampling of twenty songs inspired by the psalms, most of them part of larger collections, that I hope will encourage you as we continue to go back often to this book of the Bible that contains every human emotion and points us back to God. May this be one way we can anchor these truths in our minds and hearts.