Growing up, my dad had two big goals: the first was to make sure I had good taste in music. He introduced to me music from all ages, across international genres, but some specific genres crossed over to his second goal, to make sure I had watched all the classic rom-coms and “teenage” movies. This specific crossover of music went into my own genre that I liked to call a “high school movie soundtrack”. This soundtrack can be broken down into different decade eras, this is the first installment, the era closest to our own, the 2000s.

Movies from the 2000s are littered with schemes, accompanied with the most iconic songs. Every time I hear the song “Dirty Little Secret,” I can imagine the 3 girls in John Tucker Must Die planning in their bedrooms to get revenge on their cheating ex boyfriend. While my own high school experience hasn’t included plotting the complete takedown of an adulterous ex, the scene of the girls plotting can be seen as a parallel to any time I’ve hung out with my own friends, all sitting together talking over whatever movie we decided we’d “actually pay attention to” that night. Each of the songs on my 2000s movie soundtrack playlist, while not exactly fitting these stereotypical 2000s plots, create a visualization of moments in my high school experience.

This playlist is composed of the songs that would make up the soundtrack of what I thought my high school experience in the 2000s would sound like. It is inspired by movies like John Tucker Must Die, A Cinderella Story, Napoleon Dynamite, She’s the Man, and Princess Diaries. Give it a listen and see how it compares to your own childhood perception of high school!