Editor's note

By Matt Hirschfeld

Thursday, February 12, 2009

I can pinpoint the conception of my anal retentiveness. My parents had finally budged and bought a desktop computer. It was nothing fancy, but it fueled my obsession with making mix CDs.

From late grade school to late middle school, I made mix cassette tapes. I recorded whatever popular jams happened to be playing on the radio when I was near my stereo. Sometimes, I would even hold my dad’s old tape recorder to a TV’s speakers to record the music from music videos. I had a pretty stellar collection of tapes by the time that desktop entered my life.

The tapes, though, were spoiled with missing beginnings, cut off endings and fuzzy recording qualities. I quickly adapted to burning CDs instead, and I now had play counts, numbered tracks and 80 minutes to make the mixes of my dreams. My mix CD collection would put those Now That’s What I Call Music! CDs to shame.

My musical taste hadn’t changed much since the mix tape days (whatever was on the radio and pleasing to the ears was good enough for me), so I just downloaded the music on the computer rather than waiting for the radio to play a song I liked.

Each of my orderly CDs would have put an expression of awe on even Martha Stewart’s mug. The CDs were all 18 tracks and no artist was repeated on each CD. They were numbered and I had a typed listing for each disk. I made sure I had a backup of each CD, just in case. If someone listed off any song from the CDs, I could name which disk it was on (and usually even the track number).

I know now that I had all my mixes wrong. I mashed together songs in favor of orderliness rather than flow. I had pop next to rock with hip hop thrown somewhere in the mix. Elliot’s story on page 6 explains what makes a good mix of music, from flow to format, for a significant other or for yourself.

My first vehicle, a bare bones truck, had only a cassette player and a radio. I dug through my middle school memorabilia and pulled out those tapes. I may have been jamming to five-year-old tunes for most of my high school years in that truck, but never had I been more thankful for a piece of outdated technology.

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