I miss mixtapes! I didn’t make many and have received even fewer, but it’s illuminating to see what tunes friends and lovers dig. As anyone who compiles a mixtape (this includes CDs) knows, it’s an act of creation bringing together those complementary cuts that connect to the person who’s getting the CD.
Mixtapes can be magic, but magic can be dangerous. I know. With mixtapes, the results can be … mixed. I made a mixtape that wowed a lover but didn’t thrill her husband so much. Another time I made a mixtape that told me things I didn’t want to hear – sacred, irrefutable wisdom. I picked those damned songs … or did they pick me? The old question for anyone creating (channeling?) art.
I proposed to someone in a letter, accompanied by a magnificent mixed CD. I was laying down some choice tracks — love songs, sort of, from the likes of Bob Dylan, NRBQ and the Breeders; eclectic stuff with a hook from Bjork, Laura Viers and the Flaming Lips – when my own choices started to turn on me.
When you’re assembling a proposal by mail, you don’t need to be thinking about probabilities. I went to college with this woman, and we had embarked on an on-again, off-again kind of long-distance thing over a period of years. Lot of passion when we were together, but … To quote Bruce Springsteen, “I don’t understand how you can hold me so tight and love me so damn loose.”
Anyhow, I’m tapping my toes with my CD while I bare my soul on a page of lined paper when the Radiohead song I chose starts playing. “There There” is not a love song, but it burns with passion. I’m singing along with the lyrics, “Just ‘cause you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there.”
I can’t say the balloon completely popped at that moment, but by the time the last cut came on — Wilco’s “Nothing’severgonnastandinmyway (again)” — I was pretty sure something was gonna stand in my way.
Do I need to tell you I got no response for that latter and mixtape? Don’t answer that. She didn’t. Sure, it was disappointing, but I was prepared. My mixtape had told me all I needed to know.
