Going Down Mixtape Memory Lane

I’ve been holding onto a big bin of mixtapes for decades, lugging them from dorms to apartments and finally to our house, storing them under beds and in closets. And since the old college boombox I bought at Walmart for $30 went that great music palace in the sky last year, I no longer have a way to play any of them. Which means it’s way past time to let the tapes go as well.

It’s the logistically practical thing to do, but it’s still bittersweet.

I’d already digitized all the songs I wanted to save years ago, so there really isn’t any point in holding onto the cassettes themselves. But I needed a record of all my work, because who am I if not an obsessive information organizer? (Also, as has been noted, I am still very much a Rob Gordon in many ways.) So I catalogued alllll the mixtape song lists in a Notion database.

That’s every mixtape I made for myself starting in the spring of 1992, when I was in eighth grade, through 2001, when I finished grad school. And it’s truly a trip to see the evolution of my choices and preferences within that nine-year span.

Some songs appear again and again (hello again, Beastie Boys’ “Sure Shot”); some songs I’ve loved all my life don’t even make it onto the tapes. (Why such a paltry number of Buffalo Tom songs?) I can see where I deeeeeply got into oldies during high school, and most so-called “mainstream” popular music doesn’t even feature until I get to college.

Speaking of, once I got to Bucknell, my mix-making productivity declined significantly — it’s like you can see the arrow zoom down on the timeline graph. Blame it on my fancy 5-CD changer stereo, blame it on the drastic shift in my social life (read: 🍻 💃 👯‍♀️ ), but I can definitely see the vibe shift.

Still, it’s touching to look at a list of songs and know exactly what I was feeling and what I was living through in that moment. “Trilobite 12” was summer 1994, Interlochen Arts Camp, and my Green Day obsession. I can taste Stewart’s Ginger Beer and smell the breeze coming off the lake.

“Trilobite 16” — oh yes, all of my high school mixes were the Trilobite series — was the fall of my senior year, where we were giddy with “power” and spent way too much time driving around town, eating Sheetz shmuffins, and hanging out at Deb’s house watching Friends and Animaniacs.

“Summer/Winter” was the summer I spent on campus at Bucknell before my senior year there, and it’s a hazy blur of sweaty nights in my friends’ backyards, walking downtown to the Townie T, and putting Backstreet Boys and the Austin Powers soundtrack on repeat.

Once I switched to making CD mixes in grad school, even more of the mix-making magic was lost. Sure, Dan and I made and mailed CDs to each other when we were first connecting in the spring of 2001 — and you better believe I have all of my CDs saved as well — but I feel like there’s less intimacy in a CD than there is in a tape. It’s less tactile and more clinical.

I love looking back on these moments and remembering, but I don’t need the physical tapes any more to keep me tied to the past. I may recreate a few old mixes in playlist form on Apple Music — or create a mega-playlist of high school favorites to match my nostalgic “College Jams” playlist — but I can let these go with a smile and a fare-thee-well.

Cue the Green Day and let’s send them off with a song!