Those of you who never made a mixtape will never know the effort it required to make ‘just right’ side A and B!
Kids these days haven’t even had a CD kind of experience. I remember first CD and the excitement and joy of skipping to any song and not having to fast forward it or risking the tape getting tangled and if pencil couldn’t fix it it was gone for good. To make a mixtape it took a lot of love of a certain song and even more patience. Nine out of ten times just when you think you got it the DJ starts talking so you either end up with your favorite song of the moment with no ending or wait another hour or more to come back up and try to catch the whole thing. It was work! Then came CDs and save us soooo much time. No waiting by the radio to record the song, no need to rewind and ‘look’ for that one song cause you can just skip to it. That lasted for a good while.
Then came Apple products that could download more songs, by any artist just by downloading it. And then came smart phones, streaming apps and endless possibilities to make your very own playlists. As someone who put herself to sleep with loud-ish radio in a room to kill the sound of screaming in the living room, listening to the ‘right’ station was very important. Only recently I read an article that did a research on people who fall asleep with music or tv on. Apparently if you did that you were never get to REM stage of sleep. Does that mean I haven’t ‘slept’ in years? Back to our subject. For those of us known as misfits life was at some point or for most of it been unpleasant, to say it nicely. I was always of strong belief that life can be a little better if it only had a soundtrack. Sometimes it’s a sad playlist that helps you through a breakup ( I’d like to thank Adele and Brandon Flowers single albums for those songs), sometimes it’s an upbeat one that you play while at dentist to distract you from THAT sound ( mine is all over the place but nothing sad or slow for the obvious reason) and sometimes it’s just a fun one for a dance party of one in my own living room. So if you are going through something taught or exciting or just a distraction: make yourself a playlist, put your headphones on and give that moment a soundtrack!
***Soundtrack from the movie ‘Begin Again’ ( mine for this post was ‘Tell Me If You Wanna Go Home’) and ‘Music Is Power’ by Richard Ashcroft