An Affair to Remember: The Mixtape
April Showers and assorted mixtapes from 2015 - 2017 | C.S. Harvey
My first mix tapes as a kid were nothing more than a collection of songs taken straight from the radio. I can remember standing by my RCA single cassette stereo listening to K92, my finger on the recording deck pause button, waiting for the commercials to end, for the DJ to stop his front sell, and to give that pause button its release. The object wasn’t even to create a kind of personalized playlist as much as it was just an attempt to get a copy of your favorite songs so you could listen to it whenever you wanted … songs liked “Sledgehammer”, “Kyrie”, “West End Girls” and “True Colors” all blended together with snippets of radio chatter, the glitch of tape drag, or sadly, that sound of the cassette clicking to a stop before all of Cameo’s “Word Up” had come to a close.
April Showers mixtape and track list | C.S. Harvey
By the early 90’s my mixtapes were moving closer to art form while leaning in hard on the artifice of intention … and I’m talking about that love letter of songs for that girl who simply wasn’t like all the other girls. This is when you listened hard, chose wisely, put everything together just perfectly so … you wanted to excite her with songs she loved played next to the songs you loved, a few deep cuts from favorite bands, something you hoped she’d never heard before but suddenly couldn’t stop listening to … music as a declaration that felt curated, considered, and cohesive. And yet it still possessed innocence and it took time … it took time to build, to consider, to decorate and design, to listen and to share … “And It Stoned Me” next to “Fall on Me”, Jane’s Addiction’s “Classic Girl” sliding right into The Cure’s “Pictures of You”, Mazzy Star paired with Dusty Springfield, the Righteous Brothers and 10,000 Maniacs … old memories in black pen handwritten ink and I still have the mixtape she made for me.
As I moved into college and for the handful of years afterwards, my mixtapes became tiny radio stations. I was collecting songs from friends’ music collections while diving into my own ever-expanding personal collection. I started collecting vinyl records and spending my free time in record shops, antique malls, and thrift stores. By the 2000’s I was working in radio and putting together twenty-six live “mixtapes” every week as on-air talent with the freedom to play whatever I wanted. I became a contributing writer to an Americana music media outlet, I spent two more years volunteering in non-commercial radio stations, and finally for a time, I worked in an upscale bookstore that also served as a record store … my life was now a mixtape and I was surrounded by song.
The final series of mixtapes I made began in the spring of 2015 and ran through the early months of 2017. By this time I found myself being drawn more and more to photography and travel but to them both I wanted a soundtrack of my own making. I had a great turntable, a fantastic dual cassette deck, and a deep library of music. For one last time I went analog in the digital world. I made soundscapes, themes without algorithms, I dropped the needle and heard it snap, crackle, and pop in my ear wherever I was in the world … one hand on the wheel, one eye on the road, the other to the lens … as the first drops of rain begin to fall and the piano notes welcome the first line of the Low Anthem … “On my way home …”
