I'm going to jump around here, which is how I talk when I'm excited about something. First, the book: Rob Sheffield, who makes a living writing about music, uses the concept of a mix tape to share his very personal story. He meets the woman who becomes his wife, tells the story of their marriage through music and describes in detail the day she unexpectedly collapses and dies in their home. We meet Renee only through Rob's memories and her track lists and our hearts break along with him. Even if you have never been through a loss like this, it feels entirely relatable. That's because he uses the completely universal concept of music as memory to tell it.
My God, who can't relate to that? We all have those songs. The ones that break us apart or get us back on track. Nothing can transport us quite like the opening strains of a song we used to love. I can't hear the Simon & Garfunkel song "Cecelia" without remembering a ridiculous (and highly dangerous) drinking game my girlfriends and I made up in high school. The first few notes of Barenaked Ladies' "What a Good Boy" take me back to the last night of my freshman year of college when a good friend made me a mix tape for the drive home for summer break. Every Dave Matthews song reminds me of summer and the perfect buzz and the breeze off the Columbia River at the Gorge Ampitheater. There are many more songs that I can't even write about now; the connection between song and emotion and memory are so strong and somehow so fragile, I feel even mentioning them diminishes their meaning. Sheffield writes, "Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made of memories." I feel ya.
Do you have a box of tapes like this? I'm talking to those of you over the age of, say, 32. You young people can stop reading now. A Spotify playlist is NOT a mix tape. A mix CD isn't even a mix tape. Only a mix tape is a mix tape - permanent and full of audio buzz and, if you're really old like me, full of songs you waited to record off the radio so you sometimes hear the last few seconds of a DJ intro. Mix tapes are the whole damn thing.
Don't come at me, young people. I still make iTunes playlists for EVERYTHING, but it's not the same. They're too easy to make and too easy to delete. They're too... dispensable.
I have a box in my crawl space spanning DECADES, telling the stories of college parties and breakups and road trips. They don't play well anymore, they're all slowed down to about 3/4 speed. But, I won't let them go. The one above is from 1995. I was about to go on a choir trip to Europe and a boy who was a "friend but was more than a friend but was just a friend" made it for me for the trip. He's a smooth guy - was then, still is now. The playlist is full of suggestive R&B tracks that would still get regular rotation today. It has survived more than 21 years and countless moves and I will never get rid of it. Like any good mix tape, it's a moment of time and even seeing the handwriting (and, that people used to call me Missy) brings me back to my pink wallpapered room in my childhood home when he gave it to me. That's a mix tape. It's history, frozen.
That's why this book feels like so much more than just a memoir of loss. Sheffield begins each chapter with a mix tape track list. Somehow, reading the lists makes this already personal story feel even more intimate. He tells their story through the music that served as their soundtrack. I don't know many of the songs, but you feel the flow. I saw myself in the tape on page 180, with the daring mix of Bob Dylan and TLC.
Through the track lists and the chapters between, you watch the tone change from their life before to his life after.
Even if your taste in music isn't the same, you feel the connection. My cheeks hurt from smiling as he describes their wedding almost solely through the music. He describes what they danced to, what moved them, the cheesy reception numbers that got the grandparents out of their seats. I spent more time on the "must play" and "do not play" lists for my wedding reception than I did on the flowers, so this whole section was totally my jam (my "do not play" list was longer than the list of songs to play. Never play Celebration, people. It's beneath you.)
The guy's a music critic, so his taste is way cooler than mine. But, as he moves through the 90's, I was elated to see Kriss Kross, En Vogue and Tag Team, even if only referred to in an ironic way. He also references the long-forgotten Natural Selection one-hit wonder "Do Anything" which dramatically elevated my drive to work this week (it is still, after all these years, "smooth to the groove like sandwich bread.")
The best thing about music and songs and mix tapes is also the worst thing: they always remind you of a time you can't get back. I'll never get ready for a night out with my college friends to the Fugees "The Score." I'll never cruise the boring roads of my home town, singing - loudly - to "Ghetto Superstar." I'll never again bawl my eyes out to the Dixie Chicks' "Heartbreak Town" as I drive across the northwest to a town I've never seen, ready to start my life as a grown-up. The memories will make you smile, but they'll just as quickly break your heart.
That's the ride Sheffield takes you on. Imagine him trying to listen to the songs around which they built their life - after she's gone. Not only does hearing those old songs hurt, he hurts for the songs "she never got to meet." It's sad and beautiful. Grief is not universal; music, regardless of taste, certainly is.
Who should read this book? Anyone who has ever made or received a mix tape. Anyone who's been in love and felt the need to immediately make a tape to say all the things they're not ready to say out loud. Anyone who's had to say goodbye to someone they love with the hope the tape will stay with them and maybe the songs will always remind them of you.
The risk of giving someone a mix tape is that they won't understand it. Even worse, they may not like it. I'd feel less vulnerable writing someone a letter than I would making them a mix tape. That's how I feel about this book. I want you to feel it as deeply as I did. I want you to run to the basement and brush the dust off those boxes of Magnavox cassettes. I want you to hear Toni Braxton's Unbreak My Heart and cry over your college boyfriend. But, if you read it and don't love it, I never want to know.
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