Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
Rob Sheffield
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 1400083036
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Mix tapes: Stick one into a deck and you’re transported to another time in your life. For Rob Sheffield, author of Turn Around Bright Eyes that time was one of miraculous love and unbearable grief. A time that spanned seven years, it started when he met the girl of his dreams, and ended when he watched her die
in his arms. Using the listings of fifteen of his favorite mix tapes, Rob shows that the power of music to build a bridge between people is stronger than death. You’ll read these words, perhaps surprisingly, with joy in your heart and a song in your head—the one that comes to mind when you think of the love of your life.
be drowned in our beds!” That’s the way they did it in the old country. Two people battle the elements that are trying to kill them, and if one of them weakens, the other dies. If they stay strong, they get to die some other way. That was romance. My grandparents stayed in love for over sixty years. a little down, a little duvet JULY 1991 Renée made this tape for us to listen to while falling asleep, and it served us well on many nights. It’s a tape full of soothing soul and vintage
say it was all a mistake. It was all around and in my head, like the train rumble Al Pacino hears in The Godfather right before he shoots the Turk. “One More Hour” is a punk-rock song where Corin Tucker sings about how she has to leave in one more hour. Once she leaves this room, she can’t come back. She doesn’t want to go, and she tries to talk her way out of it. But Carrie Brownstein sings to her in the background vocal, telling her it’s over. The way their voices interact is like nothing else
another couple of hours. The city lights are blinking through the trees of McCarren Park. The house across the street has a stuffed wooden owl whose head spins around every fifteen minutes, which is extremely annoying. The city is full of adventure, just a couple of subway stops away. But I’m not going anywhere. We met on September 17, 1989. We got married on July 13,1991. We were married for five years and ten months. Renée died on May 11, 1997, very suddenly and unexpectedly, at home with me,
two-thirds-empty liquor bottles into a bowl of Crystal Light and call it Orange Lotus Surprise Blossom. Then, after the party’s over, you hold on to the tape. You never know when you might get a call, saying, “Dude, party tonight! Bring a tape!” You always make sure to keep a dance tape or two handy in your room, JUST IN CASE, because YOU NEVER KNOW, the same way Cosmo girls keep a spare bottle of bubbly in the fridge. A few friends are over having drinks, a song comes on, a couple girls start to
So I just put a yellow sticky note on each one, saying, “Free.” There was the dark green bowler with the black velvet trim, the soft green cotton sun-hat she wore when we were walking around Dingle Bay in Ireland, the crimson cloche made of hemp fiber. There was the pink pillbox that she bought in a Salvation Army in North Carolina, with the mildew on it that made her sneeze. There were two different straw hats, one of which she wore to a barbeque lunch our wedding weekend, except I could no