Mantra Monday: Mix It Up.

I've noticed I talk a lot about being stuck in holding patterns, like a needle in the grooves of a vinyl record, a long lost vestige of possibly a simpler time. I still remember playing my New Kids on the Block record and thinking that the Mathematician and the Artist were sooo cooool when they bought our first family cd-player after our cat broke the arm on our record player. Today, we don't even have to commit to buying an entire album, we can just pick a song here and there, thanks to the miracles of iTunes.

The result, the songs which end up on the radio begin to find their way on to our iPods and nothing more. When was the last time you dug deep into the tracks of an album to discover a something new? Or looked back and into your cd collection and discovered something new? There's really so much out there that it's easy to let those on the outside dictate what we listen to, where we go, what we see, and who we are.

When I last was in RI I came across my stash of mix tapes - it was like rediscovering those favorite kicking around shoes that become buried under the bed. You know, those 90 or 110 minute musical manifestos where as teens we wanted to share some really cool tunes with our friends, express our angst, or profess our love (or at least that we liked someone). Listening to those (yes, I still have a cassette player Walkman and a cassette deck in my 96 Volvo) brings back a flood of memories and spurred me on to open my cd wallets that have been collecting dust.

Honestly, there's some stuff I won't admit that I own (I've already admitted that I listened to New Kids on the Block) but I do have some pretty cool stuff lurking in there (for example: Jabe's album Outback County Vampire*). Like with anything, finding the cool stuff, involves patience, a willingness to dig deep, and peel back the layers.

What's the coolest thing buried deep in your collection?


So it's 11:30 on a Monday night and I'm starting a MixCd.
The title? In Progress.

Catch ya'll on the flip side.





*Thanks Lady Apollo. :)


UPDATE: According to a member of Bauhaus, the reason we're limited to 80 minutes in today's CD savvy world is thanks to the Sony execs who based CD-R capacity on Beethoven's 5th. Interesting. But I have to ask why Beethoven? Why not Bach or Shostakovitch?