October 16, 2024

Love is a Mixtape

At the turn of the century, almost all of the romantic love I had to give was unrequited, and the only problem with that (in retrospect) was that I never got to realize my dream of having a boyfriend come along to digitize my vast collection of mixed tapes, and then burn them onto CDs. And I suppose I could have done like Dalloway and digitized the mixtapes myself, but I didn’t have my own internet connection back then, let alone a CD burner, and besides, it used to take entire afternoons to download half a song, and burning a CD could take even longer, and the only people with patience for such projects were the kinds of emotionally stunted, technically-inclined dorks that I tended to have crushes on, and none of them ever cared about me enough to do so.

So my trove of mixtapes was lost to time, from “Britt’s Mix 93” to the ska tape our friend Laura made in 1997, that very random tape I made in Grade 10 that went from April Wine’s “I Wouldn’t Want to Lose Your Love” to Alannah Myles’ “Lover of Mine,” and that most iconic Summer of ‘99 tape whose Side B began with Sophie B. Hawkins’ “As I Lay Me Down” to Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby” (and “Angels” by Robbie Williams in there somewhere).

And yes, it’s true that if any of those CD burner-owning boys I’d fancied had ever managed to love me back, the attraction might have petered out around the time they discovered the extent of my affinity for soft rock. The one guy I did go out with during this period didn’t have a CD burner either, but when I gave him a tape that included Heather Nova’s “London Rain (Nothing Heals Me Like You Do),” he was really mean about it, which should have been a red flag—nobody puts a track from the Dawson’s Creek soundtrack in the corner. (Full disclosure: his mixtape for me was really cool, introducing me to music I love to this day, but he was not very nice in the end.)

Mixtapes, for me, in the 1990s, were almost like a scrapbook, compiled in real time. My Sony Sports Walkman was always nearby, and I’d be listening to the tape-in-progress, removing the tape from my deck only to add to it, taping something off a friend’s CD, recording a song off the radio, or from somebody’s parents’ record collection. And then once the tape was complete, it would be titled and dated, a record of time, much of the music not actually contemporary, assembled by chance, but that would become my soundtrack as I made my way through the world, foam headphones ever-present on my ears (at least until I stepped on the headset and broke it, which happened all the time).

My husband never made me a mixtape. We met in 2002, and he’d already embraced the future, a never-to-be-obsolete technology called the minidisc (ha ha) and he brought me on board, for which he still regularly apologizes. He must have made me a mix-minidisc, but I don’t remember what was on it, mostly because there was so much else going on at the time, our separate lives converging, the beginning of forever. In 2005, under the impression of an iconic ad, we each purchased an ipod shuffle (catchphrase: “Life is random”), which was the start of the end of our relationship with physical media (although we still own an entire shelf unit of CDs).

But the ipod shuffle would not be the the end of us sharing music together, on road trips, in the kitchen doing dishes. My husband has a Spotify playlist called “The Kerry List” that is 2 hours and 26 minutes long, specially curated at the intersection of our tastes, and while there’s no Mariah Carey, every single track is one that makes me exclaim, “Tune!” at the opening strains, and to me there is nothing more generous.

Including “London Rain (Nothing Heals Me Like You Do).”

Love is a mixtape, indeed.

(Read on to find great mixtape book recommendations!)