Sometimes I take mixes a liiiiiiitle too seriously...

I may or may not have spent about six hours over the past three days assembling an epic mix for my friend's thirtieth birthday. It came about in something of the following fashion:

"So I'm gonna make the cake, and pick up the beer, and turn on the Christmas lights [our 'grown-up' version of balloons tied to the front porch]... anything else you'd like me to take care of" 

"... Oh yeah, you could throw some music together, maybe a playlist or something...?"

Throw together a playlist, pshaw, who do you think I am? Someone who... just... throws together a playlist?!? I mean really....

Making a mix is a delicate and time consuming thing. Making a mix for someone else is doubly so, but making a mix for someone else's party, and a Big Birthday at that... well apparently that takes a very. Long. Time.

Step 1) Alphabetically go through my entire itunes library looking for songs my friend would like.

Step 2) Secretly rip several of her favourite CDs onto my computer and added some of those songs.

Step 3) Cull the list, removing any excessively represented bands (max of three songs per group)

Step 4)  Begrudgingly remove songs I knew were on there more for me than for her.

Step 5) "Randomize"

I don't perhaps give computers the respect they're due... manually randomizing things is near fracking impossible! Clicking on songs, scrolling down the list and dropping them wherever they happen to land, then repeating over and over and over again... yeah that was a good two hours right there.

Step 6) Song-to-song transitions

... the most important part of any mix-making venture. Sure the songs you pick are important, but having them flow properly, having the chords blend seamlessly or jar your ears in just the right way, having the right balance of boppy, slow, old, new, clear, grungy... that takes time. Three. Hours.

It may be fifteen point three hours long (in the words of my sister: "Sweet Jesus, when is she even going to have time to listen to all that!?!") , but I take my mix-making responsibilities seriously, especially when the fate of a thirtieth birthday hangs in the balance (or so I like to think)!

The Epic Detour that is making car-mixes

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?

Soul-Time-Sing-A-Long

I love to sing along with songs. You know this about me (and possibly about yourselves!) though I don't think I wrote that quite properly... it should read:

I LOVE to sing along with songs!!! 

There are many things that make me happy, but this would be top five, maybe even top three.... actually more like top two. I love it so very very much. Very much.

There is something about singing in the car specifically.... in the summer, windows rolled down, driving way over the speed limit, with the music so loud your ears are ringing and singing so loudly that your voice goes hoarse (I actually once sang so enthusiastically to 'Bicycle Race' by Queen while on the way to work that I lost my voice and had to write things down for the whole day...) and I can't even put into words how much joy this brings me. I have tried on several occasions and just never seem to be able to quite capture it... However, on a recent road-trip I re-heard one of my all time favourite songs (I'm not afraid to admit it, its uber 90s alternative, and not exactly the most profound thing ever, but I can't help it, it speaks to my soul!) and was reminded of all of the things I love about singing in the car. As cheese as it is, this experience is so fully encapsulated in Open Road Song that I feel the need to block-quote it...

"I crack a window and feel the cool air cleanse my every pore, as I pour my poor heart out to a radio song that's patient and willing to listen, my volume drowns it out. Yeah but that's okay, 'cuz I sound better than him anyway, any day. Yeah my voice is sweet as salt. I search for comfort and I find it where I found it many times before, though times before can be forgotten..."

Its the singing-along part! The you-drowning-out-the-music part!  The finding-comfort-in-pouring-your-heart-out part!

Back in high school all of my car-songs needed to be of a certain type to be able to 'work'- loud, fast, rock. Thats's what car music was to me, but my car-music tastes have broadened vastly in the interim... From Sons and Daughters by the Decemberists to Valley Town by Elliott Brood they have widened to include songs that paint sweeping vistas, that use intricate harmonies and gut-grabbing melodies, not just those that are loud and fast. And yet the all important lyrical factor has remained unchanged. I know many people who would disagree with me on this, but lyrics are as important to a song as the melody, the production values, or the instruments its played on.

I sing along with songs. You need good lyrics to sing along to, and I need to sing along for a song to be real to me. Singing along is how songs seep into my soul and become an inseparable part of me. Its how they transport me in time (Semi-Charmed Life), its how they make me homesick (Oh Alberta), its how they make my heart burst (Wake Up)...

Two of my current favourites are Ghosts by Laura Marling and Gentleman by Said the Whale. Neither are all epic, neither are all loud, neither are what one might call all hard-core... but both have absolutely sweet and beautiful lyrics that melt my insides when I hear them and even more so when I sing along.

Whether the song is quietly beautiful or heart-thumpingly exciting- that feeling of flying down the open road, singing at the top of your lungs.... perfection.