A playlist can be more than a sequence of songs. It can be storytelling in music: a small architecture of feeling, a doorway into reflective music, or a place where cinematic soundscapes and atmospheric music can meet the ordinary details of a day. For Nicole Victoria Lauren, an independent music artist guided by sincerity, playlisting is not about chasing numbers or building a promotional machine. It is about following a feeling and offering someone else a place to hear it.

You are invited and welcome here. Stay as long as you’d like. Imagine this post as two rooms with their doors open: one with a long table, warm light, and people who know how to stay; the other with dark windows, gathering weather, and strings carrying what words cannot quite hold. You can wander into either one, depending on what the moment asks of you.

Curation as a Form of Care

Nicole’s work moves across styles and emotional landscapes, from intimate songs to cinematic and orchestral compositions. That range is part of the point. Music does not have to live in one room forever.

In the spirit of Prima Voca, the “first voice”, these playlists begin with intuition rather than a formula. The question is not, “What should an independent artist be sharing?” It is more human than that:

What do I want to sit beside today? What sounds feel true? What might help someone else feel less alone?

A curated playlist can hold those questions gently. It can say, “These songs have kept me company,” without insisting that they mean exactly the same thing to you. That freedom matters. You might hear a different story in the same melody, and that is completely welcome.

A Toast to My Friends – Songs for the Long Table

A Toast to My Friends – Songs for the long table is the room with the kitchen light on.

Its description says it beautifully: “Warm soul and easy mornings: the kind of music that sounds like the people you keep.” That phrase, the people you keep, is at the heart of the playlist. Not the people who appear only for the photographs or the bright, easy chapters, but the people who remain through the complicated parts. The ones who answer the late-night message. The ones who can sit in silence without making it feel awkward. The ones who know your old stories and still make room for the new ones.

This is music for chosen family, loyalty, and gratitude. It feels like a slow morning, a mug warming your hands, a kitchen table collecting conversation one cup of coffee at a time. It has the relaxed glow of music playing while people move around the house, open cupboards, laugh at something silly, and decide, without making a formal announcement, to stay a little longer.

The playlist includes Bill Withers, Norah, Stevie, Corinne, and Alicia: artists Nicole loves and returns to. Their presence creates a kind of musical table setting, full of warmth, soul, tenderness, and strength.

And then there is Nicole’s own “A Toast to My Friends” at track 5.

That placement matters. She did not include the song simply because it is hers. She included it because it was written for exactly these people, and because it belongs in this company. The song is a sincere thank-you to the friends who have helped carry the weight of life: the people who have endured storms, celebrated the calm, and become part of the emotional architecture of home.

There can be a strange discomfort in placing your own music beside artists you admire. I know that feeling. It can seem easier to stand at the edge of the room and point toward everyone else’s brilliance. But sometimes sincerity asks us to step forward and say, “This belongs here too.” Not from ego. From recognition.

“A Toast to My Friends” is part of the conversation because it was made from the same human impulse the playlist celebrates: love that is lived, remembered, and expressed while there is still time to say thank you.

You can also read more about the song in the story behind “A Toast to My Friends”, where Nicole shares the lyrics and the feeling beneath them.

A Storm Becomes Sound

If the first playlist is a long table, A Storm Becomes Sound is a window during changing weather.

Its description is simple and evocative: “A cinematic journey through tension, release, and emotional transformation, where strings carry the weight of what we feel but cannot always say.”

This is reflective listening. It is music for the inward-facing hours: the drive home after a difficult day, the quiet walk when your head is full of clouds, or the moment when you need to sit with an emotion before you know what to call it.

Strings can make feeling physical. A low note can seem to gather beneath the ribs. A rising phrase can feel like pressure behind the eyes or light beginning to find its way through heavy weather. The music does not need to explain everything. Sometimes it is enough for a sound to say, “Yes, this is difficult. Keep going.”

That is where cinematic soundscapes can be so powerful. They give shape to experiences that do not always arrive in neat sentences. Tension, uncertainty, grief, longing, hope, release: these can move through music as texture and motion. A storm does not become beautiful because it is harmless. It becomes meaningful because it changes the air.

Nicole is drawn to that transformation. In her own music, she often explores the space between overwhelm and renewal, the place where something unsettled begins to become sound. “Rain Deluge,” for example, comes from that same interest in atmosphere, emotional weather, and the imaginative possibilities of sound.

Listening to A Storm Becomes Sound does not require a particular mood or a special understanding of orchestral music. There is no entrance exam. You do not need to identify every instrument or explain why a certain passage moves you. You can simply listen.

Or not. You can disagree with the choices, skip around, leave after one song, or return months later and hear the whole room differently. This music is for everyone, and different responses are part of the welcome.

Which Room Is Yours Today?

Perhaps you need the open-hearted warmth of A Toast to My Friends: music for gratitude, familiar voices, chosen family, and the people who stay.

Perhaps you need A Storm Becomes Sound: music for introspection, emotional movement, strings, tension, release, and the quiet work of becoming.

Or perhaps you need both. Start at the long table, then step toward the window. Let one playlist remind you who is beside you. Let the other give you space to hear what is moving inside.

That is the hope behind these playlists: not to direct your listening, but to offer a place for it. Nicole’s music and curation come from the same first voice: the sincere impulse to make room for feeling, imagination, and connection.

So take whichever door feels right.

• Listen to “A Toast to My Friends – Songs for the long table” on Spotify
• Listen to “A Storm Becomes Sound” on Spotify

Thank you for listening, in whatever way you listen. Pull up a chair, watch the weather change, and stay as long as you’d like.