Lloyd Zeffler Photo

Rock records use to rekindle my love of music when it was starting to wane. Then it was School of Rock and Dewey Finn’s blind celebration of all things rock. Now it was a book.

I picked up a bargain copy of Rob Sheffield’s Love is a Mixtape: Life and Loss One Song at a Time thanks to a Christmas gift certificate. I’m not terribly familiar with Sheffield’s work in Rolling Stone and remember him as one of those smarmy talking heads on VH1 specials. I bought the book based on the concept.

With 22 mixtapes as reference points, Sheffield writes about his relationship with his wife Renee. It’s a love story of my own heart, built on the spools of cassette tapes.

Burgess and I fell in love over mixtapes and letters. We both made our first mixtapes and sent them to each other at the same time, without knowing the other person was doing the same thing.

I don’t remember the tape I made for her. I probably put some U2 on it. Maybe some Led Zeppelin. Probably a song as a joke. Pretty sure I put some pro-wrestling entrance music on there. I have no idea why she married me.

I remember the first tape she made for me very well. She is impossibly cool, and only further cemented it with her tapes. I remember best the first tape had “Dreaming” by Blondie and “Build Me Up Buttercup” by the Foundations. It had “China Roses” by Enya. To this day that is the only Enya song I can tolerate. It had “Crash into Me” by the Dave Matthews band, which in retrospect is a wildly inapropriate song for two impressionable kids. Another tape had “Got You Where I Want You” by the Flys. That song stuck with me for some reason.

I would drive around town at night in my ’89 Toyota Corolla and play that tape non stop. My friend Ryan probably has it memorized as well, just from being in the car with me.

Burgess and I wrote letters at least weekly from Christmas break of 1999 through to the summer of 2000 when she moved to Arizona. Mixtapes were often added to the packages.

I remember making a few mixtape CDs when I finally had the technology to do so. That killed a lot of the fun though.

Now we are old and married. I’m sad we don’t make mixtapes for each other anymore. When we were deep in the drama of dating, music had beyond a profound influence on us. I forgot just how much I enjoyed making the tape and presenting it to her.

A mixtape for Burgess was a strange combination of I love you and here are some songs to show it as well as some songs I think you might like because I was paying attention to stuff you might like and I think you would like the Strokes if you just gave them a chance so I’m slipping it in after Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California” because you are taking a plane home to California for the holidays.

I need to find some songs about giving birth that don’t include Biggie Smalls’ “Big Poppa.”

Izzy and the new baby are going to need mixtapes too. Music is too important for them to not get in on the experience. And Izzy doesn’t need Alvin & The Chipmunks 2 shaping his music taste.