A tale of music and memory unspooled through a schoolgirl's mixtape

November 21, 2014 3:56 AM

Groove Is in the Heart celebrates the ritual of recording a compilation tape in the days before the infinite jukebox of the internet. [5-minute Guardian microplay]

"A lot of people will be familiar with the ritual it portrays: marking the first phase of a relationship by making a compilation tape to somehow describe yourself to the other person; cutting out your own cassette inlay; ensuring everything is just-so." Love, loss and mixtapes: the Guardian and the Royal Court's music microplay

posted by DarlingBri (40 comments total)

I was rather surprised to see Ride's Nowhere album in there, especially since they just announced the other day that they are getting back together to do a tour.
posted by chambers at 4:27 AM on November 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

And what's Marcus Junius Brutus doing there re-spooling a cassette with a pen?
posted by Captain l'escalier at 4:33 AM on November 21, 2014 [3 favorites]

A friend of mine was a *huge* New Order fan, so this brings back memories.
posted by pharm at 4:37 AM on November 21, 2014

Mixtapes feel like a lost folk art of my youth. They were kind of the social currency of my high school years. I definitely flirted via mixtape, but I also remember making mixtapes for people with whom I wanted to be friends, both as a way of signaling that I thought they were cool and as a way of trying to show that I was cool. There are songs that I'm always going to associate with particular mixtapes, and thus with the person who gave me that mixtape.

I bet this only resonates for a pretty narrow generational group, though. If you were born in 1960 or 1980, do you have fond memories of exchanging mixtapes?
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:15 AM on November 21, 2014 [8 favorites]

That was nice. Part of the importance of They Might Be Giants was that they had a lot of short songs that you could use when you just had a little bit of space left at the end of a tape.
posted by snofoam at 5:25 AM on November 21, 2014 [10 favorites]

I enjoyed this, but kept thinking about the actress and how she likely didn't really understand.
posted by davebush at 5:28 AM on November 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

A fun thing to do now is to create a YouTube playlist, based on an older mixtape. Not quite the same of course, but hearing those specific songs in that specific order still brings about a wave of nostalgia for me.

A few years ago, there was a great book compiling people's stories around mixtapes called Cassette From My Ex. Disclaimer: I was included in the anthology, and that first image in the article is from a mixtape given to me circa 1990. The story I wrote is online, if you're curious to read it.
posted by avoision at 5:34 AM on November 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

.. I also remember making mixtapes for people with whom I wanted to be friends, both as a way of signaling that I thought they were cool and as a way of trying to show that I was cool

This part of your comment spoke to me so much I had to call it out. The art of the platonic mix tape is underrated in the pop culture memory of the mix tape. I have a friend I've known for 20 years who has done many kind for me and cool things in the world since I've known her, but if asked for a list of her defining qualities, "made amazing mix tapes" would still be way up toward the top of the list.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 5:40 AM on November 21, 2014 [7 favorites]

I wish I could find it but a high school girlfriend made me a glorious mix tape on the eve of me going on a spring break trip to Europe. She was truly a master at crafting mix tapes and this was the latest in a long line that she had made for me. Sadly when I came back home from vacation something had caused her to reevaluate her life and she had decided to convert to Mormonism. We stayed together for a bit longer but in end it just didn't work out.
posted by smcniven at 5:49 AM on November 21, 2014

Thinking about it now, the mixtape served as a kind of precursor to social media - a way to project to the world (under the guise of "sharing"), "This is me. I am cool. I have taste."
posted by davebush at 5:50 AM on November 21, 2014 [5 favorites]

It was definitely about proving you were cool and had taste, but it was also the only way to learn about interesting new music if you lived in a place without a good college radio station. (There was also 120 Minutes on MTV, but my parents didn't get cable until after I'd left home.) Before filesharing and internet radio, mixtape reciprocity was a way to spread the word about bands you liked and find out about bands that weren't going to be played on Top 40 radio stations.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:05 AM on November 21, 2014 [5 favorites]

It was definitely about proving you were cool and had taste, but it was also the only way to learn about interesting new music if you lived in a place without a good college radio station.

Partly, but it was also often a attempt to get access to someone else's record collection - I remembering laboring over mix tapes for folks I had met that had records I desperately wanted copies of, but never thought I'd see again, or be able to afford if I did ($50 copy of the 1st Silver Apples LP on the wall of Vinyl Ink Records in Silver Spring, MD c. 1990, I'm thinking of you.) I was trying to get a tape back, and maybe open up some regular trading.

Tape trading might only resonate for a fairly narrow generation segment, but cultural scarcity and the never-ending, often frustrating hunt were pretty much a constant for anyone who got really into books / movies / music before the internet, I think.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:21 AM on November 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

Tape trading might only resonate for a fairly narrow generation segment

I dunno. What years would those be? I made one for my girlfriend (now my wife) 1n 1990. I still play it now and then. It has "I Want to Live Together" by Lisa Stanfield on it.
posted by kozad at 6:29 AM on November 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

Relevant and obligatory High Fidelity reference.

I only got gifted with a mix tape once - a high school friend who stayed in casual touch with me during the first year of college made me one for a birthday gift. I share(d) a birthday with George Harrison, so he made a retrospective mix of George's entire career to date - starting with "Roll Over Beethoven" with the Beatles, on through "If I Needed Someone" and "Long Long Long", on through "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and then "Something" and "Here Comes The Sun" and then the years of "My Sweet Lord" and "Dark Horse" and the doldrums of "Dream Away" and the revival of "When We Was Fab" and culminating with the then-contemporary Traveling Wilburys and ending with "End Of The Line."

It was genius - it was not only a really great retrospective, it managed to hit all the George songs I liked, and that combined with the "yay it's George my birthday twin" element meant I dragged that thing out and played it over and over on my birthday every year. I actually used it as one of my MeFi Music Swaps one year. And every time I've upgraded my music playing tech, I re-made the mix so I could still play it. It's been going on 27 years now since I got the thing, and the original tape is in a box somewhere in my closet and the two CDs I burned are stuck in a shelf somewhere, and the playlist is on my iPod.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:34 AM on November 21, 2014 [7 favorites]

God, I miss mixtapes.

But I think I now know what I am calling my radio show (which deals solely in music from the 80s/early early 90s) because basically my desire was to create a show that specialized in stuff you found out about and loved from mixtapes and late night viewings of 120 Minutes (which was always past my bedtime).
posted by Kitteh at 6:52 AM on November 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

I bet this only resonates for a pretty narrow generational group, though. If you were born in 1960 or 1980, do you have fond memories of exchanging mixtapes?

I have three memories to share with the Blue:

The first was in 1989, when I was a teenager and my listening tastes were mostly limited to movie soundtracks (Top Gun, Transformers: The Motion Picture, Streets of Fire) and my Older Sister took it upon herself to redeem me by making me a mixtape. The title was "Eva Braun was Sexy" and the cover was a postcard of a Caravaggio. It had a tracklist that included Nick Cave's "The Mercy Seat", Joy Division's "Transmission", and 808 State's "Pacific". My mind was utterly blown and my curiosity for alternative and indie music had been jumpstarted by that mixtape. My tastes have continued to change and evolve since then, but I always look to that mixtape as a seminal moment.

In 1997 I was sharing an apartment with two other roommates, and we decided to have a holiday party. Being music nerds, we decided to have it be a mixtape themed Yankee swap style party. Show up at the door with a mix, and throw the mix into a bag. At midnight, we take turns with folks reaching into the bag to draw a random tape. If someone drew your tape it was your turn to draw the next one. A lot of our friends freaked out for a moment ... make a tape but have no idea who the recipient would be? That's madness! A violation of the sacred compact of gift exchange! But still, we got into it, and we held it again next year, and year after that. The apartment broke up but the tradition was carried on by other members of our friends circle. It moved to CD's, zip discs, flash drives. For a brief and tense periods, people got really into the packaging. CD's came wrapped in hand-crafted packages of paper and vellum. Someone else contributed a series of mini-CD's that were nested in a set of hand-lacquered wooden boxes with Chinese calligraphy. Someone dropped off a mix that was baked into a cake. I look at the mixes that I've gotten from years past and it's like a geologic record of music tastes that circulated through my scene. Oh, this is the year when everyone discovered Sigur Ros. These are the years of electroclash. This was the mix that opened my eyes to Aesop Rock and The Roots.

We missed a couple of parties due to people getting older and busy, but we're hosting the 15th iteration of this in two weeks. I'll be curious if people still bring CD's, or if those will outnumber the cards that have a handwritten URL to a Youtube playlist.

In 1994, I dated a girl -- a dark, winsome poetess who I lost my mind on. The relationship was terrible and malformed, in the way that many relationships can be when one is 19 and 20. But after some time apart, we reconnected and became platonic friends. We kept each other company during our early 20's, sharing dinner, going to clubs, seeing movies. Then she left town to go to grad school in the South, and I made her a mixtape as a keepsake before she disappeared. We kept in touch intermittently. Emails sent once every year or so, usually preceded with some kind of apology about being a terrible penpal. Then we reconnected, as many do, over Facebook, a few years ago. Our friendship revived itself and we realized that we lived a few hundred miles away from each other, not so far that we couldn't see each other on weekends. We talked, apologized about the way we were when we were young, and finally forgave each other, like really and truly forgave each other for all of the mistakes and foolishness of our early days. We started visiting each other this past year, and realized that everything we liked about each other in those early days was still there, but we had matured branch, root, and crown. All of the awkwardness and clumsiness from back then was gone, and we were left as the same people, only better.

We started dating. We fell in love. Real, true, deep adult love. And I remember one evening visiting her at her apartment, and she said, "hey, you know what? I still have a mixtape of yours."

And she got up and walked to a bookshelf and pulled it out without rummaging, like she's always known where it was. I had forgotten the tracklisting, but I recognized the postcard cover right away.

"Do you even have a way of playing this?" I asked.

"No," she said, "I haven't owned a cassette player in years. I don't even know when I last listened to it. But I kept it anyway, because it was from you."
posted by bl1nk at 6:55 AM on November 21, 2014 [32 favorites]

Tape trading might only resonate for a fairly narrow generation segment

I dunno. What years would those be? I made one for my girlfriend (now my wife) 1n 1990. I still play it now and then. It has "I Want to Live Together" by Lisa Stanfield on it.

Born in 1983, in a rural part of the world where the car was absolutely central to teenage life. In high school our crappy cars (or even our parents' less-crappy cars that we could borrow) didn't have CD players. We would absolutely make and trade mix-tapes in 1998, 1999, 2000 . . . absolutely as a way to flirt or friend-flirt or posture-as-cool or invite-into-coolness (OH GOD the Tori Amos and NiN introduction mix-tapes I made for friends circa 1998/99 . . .!)

But we'd also collaborate on mix-tapes for when our friend-group was in a car together. Number of friends / number of minutes = your allotment of minutes. You'd chose songs that fit into your minutes, and then you'd bring the necessary CDs, and everyone would hang out in the basement of the person-with-the-best-audio-equipment while the tape was made. Or sometimes a particular friend would be indulged; one of my group fell deep into the Beetles as some high school kids do, and we made an all-Beetles mix-tape for driving around.

I think that was probably the tail-end of mix-tapes, though. It really was the necessity of having tapes for the car plus cd burners being rare tech that kept tapes going, I think. Already, by the time I graduated high school in 2001, CD burners were more common, and the shift was occurring to mix CDs (which have their own poetics and are themselves also kind of a dead folk art).
posted by erlking at 7:04 AM on November 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

The first mixtape I ever received had RHCP's "Me and My Friends" on it. Which makes me recall that there was a time when knowing RHCP made you cool and indie. And that makes me feel very old indeed.
posted by 1adam12 at 7:10 AM on November 21, 2014 [3 favorites]

I want to play RHCP's excellent cover of "Higher Ground" to explain to younger folks there was a time when you didn't associate the band with Adult Contemporary or even Adult Alternative playlists. (I really do blame "Under the Bridge" for that change, which is a pity as the majority of that album is pretty amazing.)

Yes, yes, I know there are many delightful older tracks but I have a weird soft spot for that one. No idea why.
posted by Kitteh at 7:16 AM on November 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

Oh my God I just remembered one of the weirdest mixtape stories ever.

So I ran with a really weird crowd for a year in the early 90's. My then-roommate was the "gateway" - he got me hooked on this quasi-local-to-New-York BBS (kids, ask your parents), and when the mod on the BBS had a local meetup, we'd both apparently developed enough of a particular kind of rep that an assortment of random others sought us both out (fortunately, they were all people we'd been curious to meet anyway) and we all bonded.

Two of the guys in the group were a couple of comic book writers I'll name Mutt and Jeff (I think they were both writing for Ghost Rider at the time). And while my roommate was kind of weird in his music taste, those guys were really out there. So we'd usually defer to them when it came to music, movies, etc. And so one time we were over at the comic book guys' house, just hanging out, and suddenly my roommate perked up when he heard a song start playing (I don't even remember what it was). "Oh, hey, [song]! I know this!" he said.

"Really?" said Mutt. "Huh, cool. Huh, not everyone knows this group, how'd you hear about them?"

"It was in this weird random mix tape a buddy of mine had in college," my roommate said. "Something he'd copied from a guy who copied it from a guy who copied it from a guy, you know. It had a great name, too - 'Plumbers for Criswell'."

And when he said that name, Mutt went very pale. "WHAT did you say it was called?"

"....'Plumbers for Criswell'?"

Mutt stared at my roommate. "....I made that tape."

"WHAT?"

"I made that tape for a party back in 1989. IN BALTIMORE."

My roommate and Mutt hastily compared notes - maybe they both knew each other somehow, a few years prior? Had the same friends? But incredibly they didn't. Mutt was in his late 20's, and had only lived in Baltimore that one year; my roommate had never lived in Baltimore. At the time Mutt had been at that party, my roommate was in college in New York. Then they compared notes - what else was on the tape? My roommate listed off some other tracks, and Mutt just nodded, amazed. "Yep. That's my tape. So that means.....there were bootlegs of my tape."

"And somehow I got one. Dude, I've been listening to that for the past three years. And YOU MADE IT."

"And there are BOOTLEGS."

By this time the rest of us were just as blown away by the coincidence. And for the rest of the night, periodically Mutt and my roommate would look at each other, totally gobsmacked and just marvel: "YOU made 'Plumbers for Criswell'." ...."And there are BOOTLEGS of 'Plumbers for Criswell'."


....Actually, if anyone out there has a copy of 'Plumbers for Criswell' too, lemme know because I want to blow my old roommate's mind.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:26 AM on November 21, 2014 [12 favorites]

The physical act of popping a cassette in the tray and hitting play, or hitting play + record; the physical act of opening a new cassette or CD -- as "convenient" as music is now, I miss all of that and the deeply emotional connection involved. I never called them "mixtapes," I just called them tapes ...... and boy was it infuriating when I'd played them so much that they finally frayed and there was nothing to do to save them.
posted by blucevalo at 7:40 AM on November 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

The great enormous huge apocalyptic break up in my life happened around 1993. I thought I was going to marry her. She fell in love with and left me for my best friend. They'd been seeing each other behind my back.

I had no idea how to get her back or how to even behave socially in this situation. I made her a pair of mix tapes to express my sorrow and my undying love.

I forgot that I was a Replacements kind of man and she was a "More Than Words" kind of woman. I believed in the power of the mix tape to send an emotional message but don't think she ever listened to them. Why should she?

Anyhow I was so in to mix tapes. When High Fidelity came out, I got calls from friends I hasn't heard from in years. "You have to see this film. The guy's exactly like you."

Good film but jeez I hope they only thought that because of the mix tape/music obsession thing.
posted by Joey Michaels at 7:51 AM on November 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

In high school our crappy cars (or even our parents' less-crappy cars that we could borrow) didn't have CD players.


Probably the last mixtapes I made were in 1997 while I was living in Japan, for exactly this reason. I think playing Mountain Song at full volume and singing along while driving out of the Yamato highlands towards Tenri may have saved me from at least one speed trap.

I did make mixed CDs for various people in the early oughts, but it wasn't quite the same.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:06 AM on November 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

I sometimes click through to people's profiles based on the comments they've made because what they say makes me think people from my past might be MeFites I did not know about, but I've probably never done it more than I have in this thread.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 8:42 AM on November 21, 2014 [3 favorites]

Timely post. I was contemplating the nature of mixtapes recently and posted a question about it for my friends on FB to discuss. Of course, 'High Fidelity' came up and a few other good things about guidelines that people use(d) when making mixtapes.

And now I get this here and it just carries on the discussion. Thanks MeFi!
posted by Gronk at 9:04 AM on November 21, 2014

The "microplay" made me smile and tear up. That's a very positive review.

I'd give a bunch of money to find even a tracklist of some of the old mixtapes I received, and maybe one or two I gave. Is this what it's like to be an old?
posted by DigDoug at 9:24 AM on November 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

That is an extremely well-done video. The process of putting that tape together was right on the money (opening the shrink wrap, false needle drop, end of side one cuts off a song, etc.). Super well done writing and editing there. Framing and editing was right on. Props to all.

Anecdote: I was a radio announcer from the 70s to 90s and made hundreds of those mixtapes...the process was exactly the same...right down to cutting out some colorful cover from a magazine, tracing the correct size, transcribing the songs, etc. There was a lot of thought and feeling that went in to one of those mixtapes.

I did it with cassettes, then CDs too (which were much easier to "burn"). I still do it once in a while for a friend, tho it's difficult to glue little splotches of color to a flash drive. ^_^

So...do we assume the guy was her boyfriend at the time? And now it's 20 years later and he finds the old tape in the attic? Assuming the gal is about 16 in that video, that would mean the guy is mid-30s? Maybe I think too much....
posted by CrowGoat at 10:23 AM on November 21, 2014

So...do we assume the guy was her boyfriend at the time? And now it's 20 years later and he finds the old tape in the attic? Assuming the gal is about 16 in that video, that would mean the guy is mid-30s?

I got that sense as well, and I think the voiceover you hear during the segment with the guy is a kid saying something about a funeral and needing to leave soon.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:26 AM on November 21, 2014

In the later section, the friend calls up that "the service starts in an hour", then the character dresses (and dances) in a black suit. My read is of love lost tragically young, yet remembering bright and vibrant youth.

That was remarkably touching – as has been the discussion. Nonetheless, I have to express my disappointment in the marked absence of Deee-lite featuring Bootsy Collins.
posted by The Nutmeg of Consolation at 10:28 AM on November 21, 2014

I loved making and receiving mix-tapes.

Having watched this I'm now sad that I met my wife after the mixtape era and have never made her one. We don't even have a cassette player.

But the video doesnt get it quite right. It looks like she sets the tape ready to record and with the pause button on and doesnt take the pause button off before dropping the needle.

Points also off for not showing her pencilling the tape past the clear end bit to the very first millimetre of recordable tape.
posted by gnuhavenpier at 10:31 AM on November 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

"Points also off for not showing her pencilling the tape past the clear end bit to the very first millimetre of recordable tape."

Hell yes absolutely.
posted by wyndham at 10:32 AM on November 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

... and then you time the amount of tape you have at the very end and try to pick a song that is both thematically appropriate and just the right length, but barring thematically appropriate, you find a 1-3 minute instrumental so that there is no silence at all before the side ends.
posted by Joey Michaels at 10:44 AM on November 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

Reminds me of the Personics Kiosks. Pricy, but you could roll a damn good mixtape from thousands of titles in ten minutes.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 10:45 AM on November 21, 2014

I was never particularly good at making mixtapes, there's definitely an art to selecting and sequencing the music that I never had the patience or a particular aptitude for, but used to do it anyway, well into the 2000s. Back in high school (the late 1980s) a friend of mine made a two-volume set of the kinds of power ballads. For our 10th reunion I made CD versions of them to hand out. This was back when CD burners were rare and blank CDRs were very expensive. I had a borrowed burner that I had to mess with for a couple of days to get drivers and everything working (I was probably using Linux at the time). My computer was okay but not great, so it took me about a week to rip and encode everything, and it feels like I spent a month burning all of the CDs. I actually don't remember if I did any fancy artwork for the covers, but I remember printing the playlists for the case inserts. And then I had to find two-disc cases. And then haul them all on the flight down to the reunion. I guess that the one thing you could criticize is the actual music, but there's no question that the songs can take me back to a particular time and place. I kind of miss that.

Mrs. Wintermind and I also distributed a mix-CD at our wedding, but that may be the last one I made.
posted by wintermind at 11:23 AM on November 21, 2014

If you were born in 1960 or 1980, do you have fond memories of exchanging mixtapes?

Born in 1959. You could say my musical life was defined more by mixtapes than anything else up until at least 2000.

In fact, the first mixtapes required no records at all. Age 12 or 13, I'd just hold my dad's tape recorder (something like this) up to my tinny little AM radio and push play/record when the right songs came on, skipping all the crap and commercials etc. So, in maybe an hour, I'd have a half-hour side of music -- beginnings of songs usually chopped off, trailing bits of DJ banter, but whatever, I'd improved on what the radio industry was giving me ... which was always the point. I wish I still had even one of those tapes. Things changed big time around my seventeenth birthday when I finally had enough cash to buy a proper component stereo cassette recorder. Something like this, except it was black. Thus did my home taping (and coincident commitment to destroying the music industry) begin in earnest.

**

Lots of good stories here, good history. But it all feels a little rose colored. For instance, not a single reference to what was for me an all too common conflict. Which was when more than one person showed up at a party with the PERFECT PARTY TAPE. Often as not, this turned the area around the stereo into a DMZ. I definitely recall physical violence, particularly around 1977-78-79 when you had disco-punk-new-wave-everything-else dividing everyone into fierce tribes.

**

Finally, I don't have any old playlists saved, but I do have this part of request list for a tape I was putting together for a high school grad party circa 1977. Note the complete absence of punk and disco (almost) and Abba. We were many things in those days but genuinely cool wasn't one of them.

Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting (Elton J)
Highway Star (Deep Purple)
Lido Shuffle (Boz Scaggs)
More than a Feeling (Boston)
Long Time (Boston)
Rock and Roll (Led Zep)
Back in the USSR (Beatles)
Get Back (Beatles)
Wall Street Shuffle (10cc)
Roundabout (Yes) *
You're My Best Friend (Queen)
Bang A Gong (T-Rex)
play that funky music white boy (Wild Cherry)
Radar Love (Golden Earring)
We don't get fooled again (Who)
Magic Bus (Who)
Jumping Jack Flash (Stones)
Honky Tonk Woman (Stones)
Brown Sugar (Stones)
Do You Feel Like We Do (Frampton)
blinded by the light (Manfred Mann) *
born to run (Springsteen) *
Love is alive (Gary Wright)
Love hurts (Nazareth)
TVC15 (Bowie)
Suffragette City (Bowie)
Evil Woman (ELO)

* yes as a matter of fact, these were all pretty much impossible to dance to, but we tried.
posted by philip-random at 11:30 AM on November 21, 2014 [2 favorites]

I must be thick - totally missed the voice from outside the room at 3:48. This is a very different video from the one I saw earlier this morning.
posted by avoision at 11:31 AM on November 21, 2014

And what's Marcus Junius Brutus doing there re-spooling a cassette with a pen?


Music was so much better during the consulship of Sulla, man. Everybody knows that. Things were just more urgent, you know?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:08 PM on November 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

Points also off for not showing her pencilling the tape past the clear end bit to the very first millimetre of recordable tape.

I would always just record until I saw tape on the takeup spool, then pause. I bet I wasted a precious second or two of tape by doing that.

(now listening to Leæther Strip's Solitary Confinement which I discovered via mixtape as an impressionable angsty teen 20 years ago)
posted by neckro23 at 12:40 PM on November 21, 2014

For me, the '10s version of a mix tape is a shared Dropbox folder where my daughters and I occasionally put things we think are awesome.
posted by straight at 1:58 PM on November 21, 2014

Do the MefiSwap. I'm still listening to the CDs I got from that in the car every day to and from work. Some of the songs that initally grabbed me, I've burned out on. Others are just starting to grow on me. I feel like I'm starting to get the intentionality of the track order, even feel the mood and personality of the CD creator. (Or imagining it. But it's fun to speculate.)

But yeah, still listening.
posted by ctmf at 6:21 PM on November 21, 2014 [1 favorite]