Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
by Rob Sheffield (Non-Fiction; Memoir and Music)

Even though technology has changed, and folks aren’t mixing cassette tapes for their friends and crushes any more, creating a compilation of favorite music is a time-honored tradition that still exists. “I’ll mix you a tape” has evolved into “I’ll burn you a CD”—and in the age of Mp3s and iPods, “I’ll make you a playlist.” Whatever the era, musical mixes mark time periods, capture moments and memories, and become, over the years, audio scrapbooks that serve to evoke happiness, sorrow, pain, and yesterday.

In Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield takes us song by song, through his musical past, including not only the tunes he shared with Renee, but those he learned to love on his own, before and after she was a part of his life. “Every mix tape tells a story,” Sheffield writes. “Put them together and they tell the story of a life.” In middle school, he says, the guys he knew were into the music, the girls were into the social scene. “When the boys busted out the air guitar, the girls would sit down. It was enough to make you doubt their commitment to rockness.” A life lesson emerges from this musical evening:  “the harder the boys rocked, the father away the girls drifted. That night, I learned the hard way: If the girls keep dancing, everybody’s happy.”

For Sheffield, a substantial number of the mix tapes in his collection are reminiscent of his short, sweet marriage to fellow writer and rocker, Renee, who died at age 31 after they’d been married only five years. On falling in love with her, Sheffield says, “I could already tell there were things happening inside of me that were irreversible. Is there any scarier word than ‘irreversible’? It’s a hiss of a word, full of side effects and mutilations.” They road-trip through the South early in their relationship, listening to mix tapes and radio, Renee screaming to the music, and Sheffield writes, “I thought to myself, Well, I have wasted my whole life up to this moment. Any other car I’ve ever been in was just to get me here.”

I feel as if I’ve wasted a portion of my own life a) not knowing that Rob Sheffield was alive and writing, b) not appreciating those mix tapes of Air Supply, Journey, and Kansas that I made in 1983 by holding my tape recorder up to the radio, and c) not appreciating that all those high school dances where I rolled my eyes while the guys air-strummed their invisible guitars along with some garage band mutilating Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” would be formative events that I might have learned more from and written a book about. Rob Sheffield did it, and he did it well. Love is a Mix Tapes rocks. And it’s here. In the BEHS Library.

*An added bonus is Sheffield’s adeptitude at weaving unusual words or variations on ordinary words into his writing, so I got a few new vocabulary terms. Always a good thing. My life feels much more complete now that I can throw “ostentorium” and “seraglio” into conversations.