The lost art of the mixtape

Playlists. I love them. We all have itunes, iphones, itouches, pandora, soundcloud, spotify....days of music conveniently places at our fingertips. The only way to sort through out musical moods is playlists. They are instant gratification for an itch to hear only club music or classic rock. For us classical musicians, it's a way to prevent Mozart from popping up on shuffle after a Cake song. Don't like a particular song on the playlist as much as you though? Simply remove it. Got some new tunes? Rework the playlist entirely!

Yep, playlist are the best!

Part of my morning ritual is showering and getting dressed while listening to music. Today I plugged in my old 80gb ipod video. I love this thing even though it seems like a dinosaur these days. Anyway, I have not updated it in nearly 3 years and this thing had THE best playlists on it. At one point in my life I took time to create perfectly themed playlists that incorporated all of my crazy eclectic tastes...the average person would think these are horrible but I don't mind moving from Jeff Buckley to Josh Groban to Heather Headly to Audioslave...to Gavin DeGraw...to Ottis Redding...not if they're all love songs.

So I pressed play and realized I never wanted to update it. It made me remember the days of mixed tapes (and CDs). I realized, it was NOT instant gratification and you were basically stuck with the final product so you had to make good decisions, not just a new song you thought you liked after a couple of hearings on the radio. You had to sit there with your double sided tape deck and/or CD player and listen to each song while recording it. You couldn't space out because you had to press stop. And after this 2-3 hour process, depending on the length of your tape and severity of you ocd, you had this double sided gem of goodness!

You had to name it, even if it was just a bunch of songs you liked with no real theme, it needed an identification. And  if you were like me you wrote each song name and artist on the insert, just in case you forget. Once we were able to burn CD's we switched to this process which at the beginning was equally as time consuming. You had to put the cds or songs you wanted onto the computer then make a playlist then burn them and 1/5 times the cd wouldn't finish and you'd have wasted a disc. Now came the sharpies and writing on top of the cd or if you were me...you make creative labels with a program, printed them out and stuck them on top of the disc.

Seems like such a pain when you compare them to just plugging your phone into your car stereo with an auxiliary cable and picking a playlist. I don't know about you, but when I find an old mix cd from high school that either I made or a friend made for me, its contents is still perfect. Whether you like the song still or not, it represents a time in your life when you rode around the city with your friends after school burning up gas just to sing along at the top of your lungs to the latest mixed cd. And even if you don't talk to these specific people anymore, you can't deny that those were simpler, happier times. And popping one of those in 10 years later gives you a sense of peace or at least a smirk about your carefree youth.

I don't have anymore of my mix tapes but I was able to save quite a few mix cds that I made and one that my HS friends made. The most epic of these has to be the mass produced "Fun Songs" cd it was filled with classic rock sing-a-long that gave us hours of car dancing while driving down the lakefront at dusk. This is what I think about whenever I hear Jukebox Hero or Pour Some Sugar on Me, and it makes me smile.

Playlist are fleeting. They take mere moments to make and even fewer moments to forget. Sit down and burn a mix CD. Take your time and think about your choices, cuz once they're on a CD they're permanent.

Or make one for a friend.

Remember simpler times.

Jam on.