When the Fairytale Breaks
How Two Playlists Capture the Magic, the Myth, and the Melancholy of Disney’s America
Author’s Note: Bookish usually lands today, tracing Gordon S. Wood’s epic through the early American republic—a nation drunk on liberty, commerce, and its own contradictions. The next entry is a challenging one: a portrait of a young country shedding its old hierarchies only to give birth to new ones, loud and brutal, irreverent and raw.
Lately, history has felt too close to the present. The noise of cruelty excused, stupidity defended, and darkness paraded as strategy has dulled my spirit. So today, I’m turning toward something softer—something that still aches, but breathes.
I’ll return to Wood soon. But for now, I offer this special edition—one stitched together with melody, memory, and just enough wonder to keep dreaming.
Making playlists is one of my quiet rituals—something sacred, even haunting, about stitching together a story through sound. Over the years, I’ve created a diverse range that includes genres such as jazz and Hip-Hop favorites, classic rock mixes, Disney remixes, and pop covers. But two playlists linger longer than the rest. They don’t just reflect who I am—they echo something deeper about America itself.
Curated Comfort: The Sound of Disney’s Golden Illusion
Kingdom of Memory is the sound of a dream America once sold to itself…and in many ways, still clings to. This playlist features orchestral covers of modern Disney songs, original scores from the Golden and Silver Age, postwar jazz, and lounge-era melodies. It’s the music of Main Street USA, filtered through Walt’s romanticized memory of the early-20th-century Midwest.
The mood is dreamy, bittersweet, and reverent. It’s a Main Street forever trapped in golden hour. This is the America where the television turned off for good after Uncle Walt shared his grand vision, where dollar stores hadn’t yet replaced family-owned businesses, and where the memory of bread lines and cold trenches in the Ardennes Forest was still fresh in the minds of a generation who had survived both Depression and war. This music offered ease, resolution, and peace, especially for those allowed inside its myths.
For my grandparents’ generation, this wasn’t just nostalgia—it was the sound of emotional recovery.
These tracks helped make sense of a chaotic world through carefully curated narrative and harmony. The storybook may have been selective and sanitized, but it offered meaning. Even the pain, loss, fear, and hardship could be wrapped in strings and resolved by the final chord.
That’s why this playlist includes not just Cinderella and Peter Pan, but also songs like “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” covered by Louis Armstrong. It’s not there to endorse Song of the South—a film steeped in racial stereotype—but to reflect the strange power of melody to persist even when the stories behind it are deeply flawed. The same goes for Saludos Amigos. As a Black southerner (and yes, I count Baltimore), I remember hearing that melody at Disney World, long before I knew what it masked. That’s the paradox of nostalgia: it soothes, even when it shouldn't. It reminds us of the beauty of the past, but rarely of its exclusions.
Kingdom of Memory is a playlist that tries, through soundscapes, to make sense of a past that never entirely made sense. It reflects both the magic and the myth — the deep desire for order after disorder, and the cost of maintaining that illusion. It’s the lullaby America sang to itself while it rebuilt, not realizing how many voices were left out of the chorus.
Postcards from the Cracked Kingdom: The Emotional Evolution of DiSNeY HoNeY
If Kingdom of Memory is the curated past, Disney Honey is what happens when that past starts to crack, and we try to gather the pieces into something that still sparkles.
This playlist is the soundtrack of the kids who grew up on Disney Channel Original Movies, the Renaissance and Post-Renaissance films, Animal Kingdom openings, and the strange sincerity of Michael Eisner-era Disney. It’s the Disney of CD players and VHS tapes, of pop covers, vinyl revivals, and emotional highs that never quite resolve. Where the older playlist resolves pain through polish, Disney Honey lets it linger—and somehow makes that ache feel sacred.
These songs aren’t lullabies. They’re love letters, breakup anthems, road trip ballads, and dream-pop invocations of magic that refuses to die. This is Disney for the cool kids—the ones who’ve cried in parking lots, lost friends, fallen in love, gotten fired, moved cross-country, and still keep a dusty Mickey figurine on a shelf somewhere. It’s fairy tale by way of feedback loop. It’s once upon a time meets what now?
You’ll find indie covers of Disney standards, soul-infused renditions, and vocalists who bring the full weight of lived experience to songs we once heard before we knew what heartbreak was. Jessie Ware’s “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes” doesn’t sound like a bedtime promise—it sounds like a prayer whispered after life has knocked you down a few times.
But Disney Honey is more than a vibe—it’s a reckoning. It’s a playlist for a generation raised in the afterglow of Main Street USA, only to realize that magic isn’t always moral, and nostalgia often comes with a cost. It’s the America that left behind Davy Crockett and learned about redlining. The America that saw the stories we were raised on get weaponized in school board meetings and campaign ads. It’s the playlist for those who still love the magic, but love it with eyes wide open.
Disney Honey doesn’t try to recreate innocence. It mourns it. And yet, it dares to dream anyway—not because the world is good, but because sometimes, dreaming is the only rebellion left.
Start with Jessie Ware. Put it on shuffle. Let it unfold from there.
In the Quiet That Follows
Most days, it’s hard to dream—or even smile—when the world has dug you in. When racism, ignorance, performative politics, and superficial incentives seem to rule everything. I put on Disney Honey the other day and just started crying. It felt like it was screaming into the void with me.
These tracks try to reclaim meaning in a postmodern world—one that feels heavier, stranger, and more emotionally destabilizing by the day. They don’t fix anything. But they hold space for what it means to keep feeling when everything around you numbs or fractures.
I can still hear Vanessa Williams’ “Colors of the Wind” in my head—especially the way it played when my mom treated me to the rare offering of a late-1990s McDonald’s breakfast for my birthday. Back then, the world felt magical, even if I didn’t know what that magic cost. I still hear those winds now, but they sound different. The air is thicker. The memory darker.
Maybe that’s the fundamental split between Kingdom of Memory and Disney Honey: one holds onto the myth, the other faces what the myth forgot. But both, in their own way, are trying to dream—trying to make the world make sense through music, even if the story never quite resolves.
