A dialogue between someone very dear to me recently, reminded me of the day when I made mixtapes regularly, and the HOURS I would pour into putting 15 or so songs together. For fun, for a girl, for me, for a bandmember, whether I was introducing someone to music for the first time, or trying to send a message, it was a passion, and an art that is lost in the iPod era, yes the shuffle killed the relavence of song order.
Putting a good mix together meant listening, moving, removing and making sure there was a flow. You didn't go from a 6/8 acoustic love song to hiphop. Songs needed to transition well and take you on a journey. Anyhow, it reminded me of one of my favorite movies, High Fidelity.
"To me, making a tape is like writing a letter - there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with "Got to Get You Off My Mind", but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs and...oh, there are loads of rules."-from Nick Hornsby's, High Fidelity
Man I need to watch that again.
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