Making the perfect mix-tape...

You don't see many tapes these days.
When I first visited Australia in 1998 I was surprised to learn that music stores didn't sell pre-recorded cassettes. V annoying at the time, as I had a my ever-present Sony Walkman (v22.1) and was keen to buy music I could listen to immedately. But I managed.

Turns out the Aussies were futurists in that regard - I don't even have anything to play tapes on any more. But I do have plastic bags full of tapes. And I'm loathed to throw them out.

These tapes - all recorded by me from my fave singles/cds/offtheradio songs of the time - are a great big slice of my life as it was in that 90minute snapshot.
If I had put as much thought into my GCSEs as I did into getting the right song to follow the last, I'd have been onto my PHd by now.




Many of the tapes no longer play and have gone to that giant ghetto blaster in the sky. But I've kept with 20 that I couldn't part with. Some, people have made for me and the sentiment was not lost on me - something I will cherish forever.
Some, I've made in what I truly believed to be the depths of despair at that time, and the song choices reflect that.
But I would say pretty much all of them have Building a Mystery by Sarah McLachlan at some point or another.

I've not really taken to making cds in the same way - it's not as much fun. There was something so damn appealing about gathering all the appropriate music together, sorting them into piles of Side A and Side B, working out the order and then crouching over a knackered old stereo for and hour and a half to make sure everything fitted.
Playlists just don't have the same love invested in them.

I've stopped making mix tapes/cds/playlists for anyone - I really do think I've grown out of it. Maybe with older age has come enough courage to articulate in person the messages I was trying to convey on tape. In recent years, it was more about sharing cool music with likeminded people than it was about doing the whole message-in-the-music thing.
But I was heartened to read this post from one of my favourite websites: in short, I am not alone!