In a sudden spurt of fall housekeeping, I stumbled on an old notebook, among many (God help the poor bastard who is one day tasked with sorting out my papers). It contains a number of delightful and cringe-worthy things, including the early notes from the Latin class I ended up dropping after a few months, a letter I wrote to my boyfriend in case I died on an upcoming plane ride to Moscow, and the playlists for several incredible mixtapes recorded in the spring and summer of the year 2000. While there's a novel's worth of story in ANY of those selections, it's the mixtapes I want to talk about.
I know it's trite to wax nostalgic about the demise of the mixtape, but I don't care. Mixtapes were IMPORTANT, man. They took time and effort and a careful combing-over of your own music collection. They said things about the person that you were at a moment in time. They were sonic diaries, painstakingly crafted. They were time capsules you could listen to over and over. They were gifts to yourself and to the people you cared about. Most importantly, they amped up road trips in borrowed cars and prolonged subway commutes in a way that made your life feel worthwhile even while you were trapped in traffic or stuck in the underground purgatory somewhere between Spadina and St George stations.
Some of the mixes listed in that spiral-bound notebook were for others. There are three particularly emotionally-fraught playlists for my then-boyfriend, with whom I was tumbling into love at the time. These include songs like Yuko and Hiro by Blur (note: if I ever put this on a tape for you, it means I am strongly considering spending the rest of my life with you), Choke by The Cardigans (one of the most underrated songs of the late 90s, I swear), 100% by Sonic Youth (always include Sonic Youth for street cred), Passin' Me By by the Pharcyde (arguably the most listenable rap song of all time), and I Will, by the Beatles (never a poor choice). Man, I seriously still remember what it felt like, holed up in my bedroom on Huxley Avenue, making each one of those tapes for him. We spent our first summer visiting each other in our respective hometowns of Hamilton and Oshawa, and we'd make each other these incredible mixes for the train rides back and forth. We were both serious music dorks and our tapes were equal parts coded messaging (when I heard Happiness by Elliott Smith on the one he made for me I knew he really liked me too) and good taste one-upmanship (oh, you've never heard of the New Grand? It's cool, I'll loan you my albums). It was a complex and convoluted courtship powered by nervous sincerity and a second-hand Walkman.
Weirdly, there's no written playlist for the one tape that actually survived from this era. I rediscovered it for the millionth time a couple of weekends ago, still lodged in my sweet-ass double tapedeck. (I still use the Panasonic stereo I bought with babysitting money in grade ten, and it is still awesome.) It includes the Backstreet Boys, mid-catalogue Barenaked Ladies, and Natalie Imbruglia. I had an uncharacteristic pop-music Renaissance in first year university. Living on a floor populated entirely by girls under the age of 20, all away from home for the first time, has a way of turning life into a dramatic slumber party. In my defense this tape also contained Dirty Dream #2 by Belle and Sebastian, which is about as hipster-redemptive as it gets.
It's an interesting exercise to listen to an old mixtape. I always find myself thinking of all the songs that I know now that I didn't know then. There's something that's existentially jarring to think of time before you were aware of some pivotal song's existence. Before the song even existed for you to be aware of it. Who was I before I heard I Am Trying to Break Your Heart? Who was I before I knew the lyrics to every song on Blood on the Tracks? I guess, fundamentally, I wasn't all that different. I was, and am, just a girl who loves a sentimental, heart-felt song, a girl who reads obsessively between the lines, a girl who hopes you do too.
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