Why We Make Mix Tapes

Remember these?

Let’s be honest with ourselves — most mix tapes are not made for the person receiving the tape, but for the person who is making it. They’re an act of preening, a self-important gesture showing impressive tastes and wanting the person who receives the mix to do something. (And let’s be honest: most often, you make someone a mixtape because you want them to sleep with you. Mixtapes are the music-lovers’ equivalent of a bizarre Bird-of-Paradise mating dance.)

My own preening is evident in the track listing above, for a mix CD I made for my wife Jess when we first started dating. It’s a collection of indie and alt-country pop, a few deep cuts, all accessible but still off the beaten path enough to be impressive. Sure, I wanted Jess to enjoy the music. But at the time, what mattered is that she knew I enjoyed this music.

This was 2012, and I was still in the thrall of John Cusack’s Rob Gordon character from 2000’s High Fidelity (the Hulu reboot was similarly delightful). I liked to stick pretty closely to the rules Rob outlined for the opening tracks, which really helped me cultivate that preening to its maximum effect.

But High Fidelity isn’t about being a music snob. It’s about letting your guard down, and learning to put another’s happiness above your own. Putting those lessons into a collection of songs was hard to do early in my relationship with Jess, when I was still doing the ridiculous mating dance. Years later — especially after we had a shared history and accompanying soundtrack — it was a bit more natural to do what Rob does at the end of the movie and put together a mix of songs Jess would like.

So for her last birthday, I put together a mix tape (yes, on an actual cassette) full of songs that meant something to her, or to both of us. You can listen to the playlist on Spotify, and I think it’s a solid representation of the music that bonds us.

And, of course, there’s still a few tracks I threw on there to impress her. I gotta keep her around somehow…