Hey, I Made You A Mix...

I love you guys so much, I've gone and made you a new mix!  Doesn't mean we're going steady or anything like that, but there's potential, right?

Yeah, I really miss making mix tapes.  I was pretty obsessive about it for the longest time, first with tapes, then CDRs.  Had one for every occasion, every mood.  But these days it's hardly worth the bother.  Most people I know don't even have access to a CD player any more (my new car shoved the CD player in the glove compartment, a begrudging afterthought, knowing I'd never use it).  These days it's all Spotify playlists and whatnot, but it's just not the same.  Mixes required care and attention -- fitting just the right amount of music onto each side of a 90-minute Maxell cassette (and, later, onto an 80-minute CDR).  The permanence of it all -- once recorded, it was too late to go back and make changes.  The artwork you'd lovingly prepare.

Playlists are too easy, just drag and drop, no length restrictions, swap songs in and out on a whim, no need for careful planning.

I still make single-artist mixes, 80 or 160 minutes of music for each band (sometimes even a 3- or 4-CD set).  But that's about it.  

Still, I felt inspired this week to make an actual, honest-to-god mix CD.  Decided to go with music suitable for easy listening in the local coffee shop, maybe the sort of mix you'd see near the cash register at a Starbucks or Pier 1 back when they still sold CDs; mostly middle-of-the-road gentle pop, a little outside the mainstream but not too far, nothing edgy enough to disrupt you when you're reading the paper or chatting with a friend but interesting enough that your ears might occasionally perk up as you overhear something that you haven't heard before...

Of course, I can't send you the mix, because I don't know where you are and you probably don't have a CD player handy.  So I still have to include a Spotify playlist.  Check it out.  If you need a little something to play at your next dinner party, or just over a Sunday brunch, this should do the trick.
 

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