We Made You a Mixtape!
A handful of authors share their unique takes on the mighty mixtape.
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Good Morning!
It’s been quite a week, so we’re doing something fun for your Friday. A handful of authors are sharing their unique take on the mighty mixtape.
“I made you a mixtape.”
Long before there were things like love languages, there was the mixtape. Whether for you, a friend, or a romantic interest, putting one together was a gift. It took time, effort, and intention. There was more to it than simply clicking an “add” button on Spotify.
You had to pick songs that would signal your intended message. It was never really “just” a mixtape, was it? Sometimes, it was as simple as wanting a friend to hear a bunch of music you liked and hoped they would, too. Other times, it was meant as an overture, a way of telegraphing affection to someone you liked and hoped liked you, too.
And then there was the sequencing. What songs should go in what order? For this writer, that was often the trickiest part—in fact, it still is. The only benefit of doing it with 1’s and 0’s instead of physical material is that we’re no longer constrained by time and space. But moving puzzle pieces around to capture the vibe you envisioned still requires art and skill in equal measure. Do you come out of the gate strong? Where are the ebbs and flows?
In the early 90s, hidden tracks became a thing. Artists would include a track several minutes after what was supposed to be the last track, surprising and delighting the listeners. In my world, we liked to put these where they were least expected. Sandwiched between tracks from Pixies and Dramarama, you might find the likes of Stephanie Mills or Tom Jones—a bit of Rickrolling before anyone knew that would become a thing. Trying to one-up each other with this became a long-running inside joke. That’s its own form of affection, too, I suppose.
Speaking of art, the J-card became its own small canvas. Some people used the space to showcase their art skills and/or their handwriting style (or lack thereof, in my case). They remained miniature bits of art long after they were mixtapes. Several of mine made several moves years after I stopped buying tapes and not owning a tape deck.
Finding just the right title was one last challenge before sending your work into the universe. That, too, is a skill. Being able to do it well consistently is a gift.
Below is a small collection of pieces from writers in the Substack ecosphere—a mixtape in written form, if you will. The best mixtapes bring disparate sounds together to represent a cohesive whole. I like to think this does a great job of doing the same. Did I fuss with the order? Yes.
Do I hope you like reading it as much as we enjoyed putting it together? Also, yes.
Enjoy!
KA—
Weekly Poem: ‘Ode to Mix Tapes’
By Sherman Alexie
These days, it’s too easy to make mix tapes.
CD burners, iPods, and iTunes
Have taken the place
Of vinyl and cassette. And, soon
Enough, clever introverts will create
Quicker point-and-click ways to declare
One’s love, lust, friendship, and favor.
But I miss the labor
Of making old school mix tapes— the mid air
Acrobatics of recording one song
At a time. It sometimes took days
To play, choose, pause,
Ponder, record, replay, erase,
And replace. But there was no magic wand.
It was blue-collar work. A great mix tape
Was sculpture designed to seduce
And let the hounds loose.
A great mix tape was a three-chord parade
Led by the first song, something bold and brave,
A heat-seeker like Prince with “Cream,”
Or “Let’s Get It on,” by Marvin Gaye.
The next song was always Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,”
or something by Hank. But O, the last track
Was the vessel that contained
The most devotion and pain
And made promises that you couldn’t take back.
📻📻📻
Sherman is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, memoirist, filmmaker, and self-titled Substack author, which earned the Featured Publication designation. He’s also the author of several books and a filmmaker. This poem originally appeared here.
Mixed Tape Name Game
By Thea Wood
My first freshman college roommate was a kleptomaniac. It took me a couple of months to figure it out, but the evidence accumulated. My lamp bulb went missing the day after she complained hers burned out. Office supplies went missing after a trip to the campus bookstore. Leftovers disappeared from my tiny fridge. These little things were tolerable, even though she denied it up and down when asked if she had seen any of these items.
The last straw was when my aunt called to ask how I liked a care package she sent…One that I never received, but apparently signed for. My roommate was out, so I did the unthinkable… I searched her desk drawers.
Sure enough, I found a few of my pens, erasers, and gads of candy and homemade treats from my dear aunt. Feeling violated and angry, I rode the elevator to a sophomore’s room who had befriended me at a party or some other public place. Her name was Lorraine, and I figured she might have some advice.
“Move in with me!” was Lorraine’s response. I was shocked but seriously intrigued as she explained that she had three suite mates who all lived with their boyfriends, so she had the entire suite to herself. We talked and grabbed a few drinks together— I was underage, but she wasn’t— and my gut told me she was cool.
I quickly packed my things and told my first roommate only after the room was empty for fear of retaliation, which is also why I never told the dorm R.A.
Life with Lorraine turned out to be an adventure. She was a rule breaker, but not in a way that hurt anyone. Her biggest crime was sheltering a kitty she found. Strictly forbidden by dorm rules, but kind-hearted nonetheless. We bonded quickly as she introduced me to other students on her floor. Some of them, including Lorraine, would become lifelong friends.
One thing she taught me that I’ll never forget: The Mixed Tape Name Game. She didn’t call it that; it’s a pithy term I came up with on the fly. Most everyone named tapes by genre like “Thea’s Fave Pop Hits” or emotion like “Heartbreak Songs Vol 1.” or a trip like “Spring Break 1987.” Not Lorraine. She painstakingly curated a playlist through her double-cassette boombox— transferring songs from the record label’s tape to her blank tape, writing down all the titles until Side A and Side B were full.
Then came the name game: Lorraine would choose words from different song titles to create a unique mixed tape title for Side A *and* Side B. My mind was blown! Not only were the titles unique and full of imagery, they also indicated what was on the tape. Brilliant! It was so much fun that I immediately started doing it myself.
You could apply it to playlist titles, as Spotify limits them to 200 characters. You don’t have to use all the words or include all the titles. Here is an example to help you out.
Songs on Side A.
“Not Ready To Make Nice” by The Chicks
“Rhiannon” by Fleetwood Mac
“I Kissed A Girl” by Katy Perry
“Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman
“Nothing Compares 2 U” by Sinead O’Connor (Prince)
“Flowers” by Miley Cyrus
Side A Title: “Nothing Compares 2 Rhiannon and I Kissed Girl with Flowers Making Nice in A Fast Car”
To this day, I’m grateful that my first college roommate was a kleptomaniac.
Try it! Leave some examples of Mixed Tape names with the song list below it in the comments. I’d love to read them.
📻📻📻
Thea is a Recording Academy member based in Detroit. She founded Herizon Music: The Newsletter and Podcast, spotlighting women’s contributions to modern music and the trends/issues affecting them. She loves discovering new talent and sees 75-100 live shows annually in real life and in virtual reality.
Mixtapes
By Andrew Smith
Memorex. BASF. Maxell.
These were familiar brands to Gen X kids interested in music. They provided us with the tools of our trade—the blank cassette. Blank tapes were the iPod and iTunes of the 80s and early 90s.
If you wanted to copy an album to listen to it anywhere else, you generally had to use a blank tape. It didn’t matter if it was an album (vinyl record), a CD, or another tape: if you wanted to make a copy of an album, the way to do it was to play the album and hit record on the tape deck.
Copying albums was useful if your friend had something you wanted to listen to. You might have a portable tape player in your car and want to listen to something you had on vinyl. A $1 blank tape was a lot cheaper than buying the original tape at the record store for, like, $10.
Beyond expanding my album collection, there was another good reason to own lots of blank cassettes: mixtapes. Blank tapes became the canvas for your creations; you could create a tape just for yourself… or another person.
You could trade and get an idea of an entirely different genre of music, ultimately expanding your musical tastes. Or, you could put all your favorite songs on one tape and just wear them out over time.
There was quite an art to it, but you could also expand your collection for free if you could record a song directly from the radio. The challenge was catching the song without an intro or outro interrupting the music, like a DJ talking or a commercial fading in. You’d want to use a second cassette for over-the-air broadcasts, then clip that version onto the mixtape.
This was a lot like recording a TV show on VHS so you could watch it later, but it also meant that the more you copied it, the lower the quality got—so you had to be careful. Even worse, cassettes are fragile and prone to erosion just from being played repeatedly.
All of these reasons were enough to need to own blank tapes, but there was one more reason I felt compelled to always keep them around.
Creating a mixtape I wanted to listen to repeatedly meant that I needed to start with the right song and follow it up with another song that made sense. If it was a punk mixtape, it needed to set the upper bound for the tape and start out fast and intense, but it also couldn’t be the most intense song on the whole album. Similarly, it was much better to do a slower song after a faster one than two slow songs in a row, and certain songs seemed to flow better together than others.
No matter what the genre of the mixtape was, the first song absolutely had to draw you in and make you want to hear the next song. The mood was set, so choosing a good lead was important.
I grew up in an era where you listened to a full album from start to finish, in a particular order, almost every time. There was no “random” button on any of my tape players, so besides, making mixtapes meant considering the order of every song.
Today, we don’t play with mixtapes very much, but there is something of a digital version: the playlist. I enjoy fiddling with playlists on Pandora, and if you can access Pandora and want to see some of those, let me know in the comments, and I’ll link to some of them. You can also share your digital playlist if you want, and people can check it out, too!
Mixtapes were social currency back in the day, a way to express yourself long before social media became the de facto home base for identity. I look back on trading them with nostalgia but also with gratitude that I can access just about any song I want instantly today.
They were tedious and time-consuming to make, but creating a mixtape gave you a pretty real sense of satisfaction, too. Did you ever make mixtapes when you were growing up, and if you grew up after tapes were gone, do you make playlists today?
📻📻📻
Andrew has the keys to the truck at Goatfury Writes, a daily newsletter in which he shares his wonder and awe about the world around us. You never know where his curiosity might take us, and that’s half the fun. He’s also a community builder and is the driving force behind Sci-Fi Friday and Macabre Mondays on Notes.
Private Dancers
by Michael Maupin
Back in the 1980s and ’90s, we had mix tapes. Not everybody did this, but if you were into music and met another sweet music fan (and you both fell in love), you probably mailed each other tapes of your favorite songs—just to keep the love fires burnin’.
It began for me in the early 1980s with my Scottish girlfriend Abigail, who insisted we cut long-distance phone costs by mailing tapes filled with conversation, lots of pining, “wishing you were here,” and, of course, music.
In April 1990, I stood up in my college roommate’s wedding, where I became smitten with the bride’s sister. So after sitting together at the rehearsal dinner and after the ceremony, at the dinner-dance, slow dancing to the Moody Blues’ “New Horizons,” we agreed to stay in touch via mix tapes. Since my college roommate, his wife, their families, and I are still in touch, I chose not to use names but initials. Nothing painful resulted from the moments L and I had during the wedding, but I fondly recall how it felt to discover (and experience) a new love interest in real-time and connect with that person about art, literature, film, and music. It was heady. And we naturally gravitated toward mix tapes.
I sent the first mix tape to L three days after the wedding. She responded a week later, in May. We continued sending tapes until October of that year—four mix tapes in all. In the last tape (Side 1 in the collage image included, along with Todd Rundgren and some John Hiatt and Joe Cocker’s cover of “Feelin’ Alright” on Side 2). I recall chatting about my life that autumn, but the rest has been forgotten.
However, a Sunday, April 29, 1990, journal entry hinted at an endgame to our private correspondence via mix tapes:
“I did think about L—wished even after that night that she was there—I told T and B about it, and they (B especially) were upset and said I should just forget her (T told me a ‘little weird backstory’ about a boyfriend of hers [that] she almost married who lived with her family, play Dungeons & Dragons and never came out to meet anyone. ‘After a long while, she dumped him,’ T said. ‘Key words: after a long while.’ I said I didn’t care because they (T and B) didn’t know the conversations and moments that L and I shared over the weekend. I said I planned to send her a [mixtape]—as I told her I would. They threw up their hands, so to speak.”
My college roommate’s sister was right.
The last thing I received from L wasn’t a mix tape—just a brief postcard from Montana.
📻📻📻
Michael is a writer in the upper midwest and is the man behind both the StoryShed and Guy Stevens Weather Report Substacks. With the former, he explores what he refers to as Daytalking, Nightwalking, and Stargazing. He describes the latter as “the writing and development of a TV serial drama based on the life of 1960s-1970s British record producer Guy Stevens.” He is also a regular on Notes, where he shares short missives on everyday life and evening music picks.
A Non-Tsunami of Manic Street Preacher Friends
By Marmi Le
I first got into Manics as a high school senior. More than three decades later, they are still my all-time favorite band! So when I started college and the interwebs was still brand new (Netscape browser, anyone?), I was messing around in the computer lab and found alt.music.manicstreetpreachers I think it was.
It was so cool to see these forum posts in somewhat real time from people around the world (but let’s face it, mainly from the UK) who also loved “Motorcycle Emptiness.”
One day there was a post from someone who not only was in LA like me, but a fellow student at my same school, in my same year. Wow, what are the chances?!
You have to understand there were zero people in my orbit who knew them, and not even many people in North America, either. I read an article recently where Nicky Wire said their first gig in the US had about four people in the audience. I recall some TV show in the UK where Toni Braxton was the guest, and she was asked if she had heard of Manic Street Preachers. She replied, “No, are they a religious group?”
When you hear the word “mixtape,” the classic image that comes to mind is of a cassette or a burned CD. I have made my share of both, but you don’t often read about people who made VHS mixtapes of bands’ TV appearances. I remember doing a bunch whenever I wanted to save a good musical guest on SNL or interview on Channel 9’s Request Video. “Jesus Jones after the break!” host Dave Kendall would tease on MTV’s 120 Minutes, then after about three commercials, I would have my finger ready on the VCR’s record button.
Well, long story short, I met up with my newfound Manics friend on campus, and he gave me a VHS mixtape of some exclusive videos and live performances of theirs I hadn’t seen before, as they were not the easiest to come by Stateside. To this day, he remains the only other group member in My Little Empire of Manic Street Preacher friends :)
Sadly, I no longer have that Manics mixtape, or any hand-curated music compilation in physical format, really. You know what they say, Everything Must Go. But check out The Everlasting below: photos of some of my 1996 mementos that I managed to keep through all these years of moving house.
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Marmi is a data analyst and the force behind Go Double Plus, where she shares her unique and often hilarious takes on pop culture. Her work can also be found on Medium, where this piece first ran, and where she leverages her skill set to do deep-dive analytics on things like music preferences.
Did you make mixtapes back in the day? Do you still make them? Do you have a good story about one you either made or received? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Thanks for being here,
Kevin—
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What a cool, diverse collection - as you put it, Kevin, a mixtape of pieces about mixtape! I'm happy to have been included among this group, and I think this came together really well.
This was so much fun to write and to read. Thank you for curating this mixed stack!