Now I don’t lightly use words like ‘forever,’ but I will love you ‘til the end of today…
Do teenagers today still make mixtapes?
I’m using that term loosely, mind you. I know there can’t be more than a few living souls on the planet who still go through the painstaking steps of cobbling together handmade cassette tape compilations to tell their crushes how they feel. Hell, I can’t even say that I’ve ever made a true mixtape, in that classic analog sense. But I came of age long enough before the streaming era that I still experienced the sensation of trading music in physical formats – usually on burned CDs, though occasionally via USB thumb drives, and sometimes even by way of data DVDs.
Does the mixtape live on in any form today? Is it a Spotify link? A YouTube playlist? A collection of TikTok videos? I ask because “Song for the Road” by David Ford is a classic, all-timer mixtape song, and I wonder if classic, all-timer mixtape songs can even still exist anymore.
I’ve always been drawn to the idea of the mixtape. In a lot of ways, this entire series is just an ambitious, life-spanning, 35-song mixtape. It doesn’t hurt that three of my four favorite artists of all time – Butch Walker, Andrew McMahon, and Jimmy Eat World – have all written songs about mixtapes. “You gave me the best mixtape I have” Butch sings in his, before adding “And even all the bad songs ain’t so bad.” “This is my mixed tape for her; it’s like I wrote every note with my own fingers,” goes the punchline of “The Mixed Tape,” the first-ever single from Andrew McMahon’s Jack’s Mannequin project; and in the Jimmy Eat World song, the note is pure regret: “Maybe we could put your tape back on/Rewind until the moment we went wrong.”
Read More “My Life In 35 Songs, Track 26: “Song for the Road” by David Ford”