So I recently read Amy and Roger's Epic Detour- yes I know its YA fiction, but I am kind of on a huge YA fiction kick right now and have stopped trying to justify it because YA FICTION IS AWESOME. Seriously. Why are so many amazing authors writing for teenagers and pre-teens? Nevermind, I don't care why, I will read their books anyway and enjoy every last one of them. Ok, so maybe not every last one. maybe just the really good ones. but there are lots of them! LOTS!
Back on track here- I'm not going to tell you too much about the book, not because it wasn't excellent, but because that's not really the point of this. All you do need to know that the book is about an epic road trip which, like all good road trips, involves a lot of listening to music.and there are lists. Tracklists of the playlists. Lists of the lists. Also lots of other random ephemera that I completely fell in love with, but the lists, the tracklists!
In situations like these, the Garden State Sondtrack situations, the High Fidelity situations, the times when you read something or watch something and its soundtrack just resonates with you you are presented with this amazing opportunity to discover a craptonn of new music, music that you not only enjoy as individual songs, but music that you enjoy as a collection, whose particular bands get to become a part of the type of music you like, not just the albums you have on our ipod. What I don't normally expect, is to see lists of music in a book populated by groups and songs I already know and love. Sure there wasn't any Elliot BROOD, but there was plenty of The Decemberists, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Sufjan Stevens, Frightened Rabbit, Pedro the Lion, Carla Bruni... not your normal run-of-the-mill bands, but also not your normal-indie-darlings either. Sure there was some The National in there, but the randomness of everything else just made me want to listen to every song in the book right then and there. Author Morgan Matson not only hit upon a musical recipe that happened to resonate with me, she was also right on in the important relationships between roadtrips and music. Music Mixes, Road Trip Mixes to be precise.
Music puts quotes on your life. Not for everyone, sure, but for a lot of people, myself included, there is something about the right song at the right moment that can make you cry, make you smile, make everything make sense in a way that few other things can. On top of that there is something about listening to music in the car, about taking the music with you, about how the relationship between the lyrics and the tune and the landscape become reciprocal... (Like how I cannot hear Graveyard Train without being transported to a five hour drive through Algonquin park having left all of my other cds securely sitting on my dresser... You wouldn't think that Australian Horror-country would make me think of the Canadian shield and fields full of cows, but now it does. Just like Snow Patrol is a tire graveyard in Cape Breton, and Eve6 means three am in the middle of the summer driving down the 404 ).
There's the pre-existing album relationships sure, but those created by the mix tape are even stronger. Because each song had to have some sort of significance to you to end up on the tape to begin with, some reason for being. And then you get to experience the changing of that relationship, the slow shift from "I loved that song Amy played at that party" to "This song is a place, is a road, is a specific time and a specific place during a drive I'll never forget."
As an aside here I'm just going to mention that I AM aware that no one makes mixtapes anymore. I realise that now its a mix CD or more often a mixed playlist on your ipod, but I am always going to call it a mixtape because thats what they are to me and thats how I approach them- carefully crafting the song-to-song transitions, the lengths of the album, balancing how many you've got of each band, each type of music, making one for keeping you awake, one for sunny days, one for the rain, one for snowstorms... I've got nothing against youngins, but I would be lying if I didn't say that I instantly have a certain level of respect for someone if I find out they grew up making actual mixTAPES.... Because its both the act of creating the mix and the process of its transformations that makes it so special.
Amy and Roger... made me want to take an epic road trip, sure, but what it really made me want to do was sit down and spend hours and hours creating new car mixes and then take them out for a stroll, listening as they shift and change and become places in my memory. What more could you ask of a song?
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