I used to be pretty good at making mixes. I was better with tapes than CDs, and the lack of time boundaries offered by digital playlists stymies me completely. I liked the process of sitting down in front of the stereo and building the mix track by track, listening in real time as it evolved. Even the physical act of pressing the buttons offered some additional satisfaction that’s lost when moving file names around on a computer screen. I still make mixes, but they take me forever. Ironically, the ease of building them now has turned it into a strangely arduous process for me. Of course, there may be a part of me that’s receded from the game a little bit after being soundly bested in my own home.

At their best, mixes are musical missives of the moment, sounding like a particularly strong show on a great radio station. Striking new songs coexist with old favorites that have nearly faded from memory, and the mood of the mix shifts in unexpected but inspired ways. I used to put intense thought into how a mix should progress, where the transitions should be gradual, and where they should be sharp, jarring. I can remember working the controls of my student loan stereo, all my accumulated music spread out on the floor around me, as I tried to get from a purely goofy song to a track of the sweetest sentimentality in the fewest number of moves, the dwindling circle of thin brown plastic on the feeder spindle mocking me like a supervillain. That intensity carried over to later endeavors, at least until my beautiful beloved pointed out there was a much simpler solution. According to her, all that was needed to insure the recipient was happy with the mix was the inclusion of the song “Music For Girls” by Baxendale.

I scoffed, I harrumphed, I jutted my eyebrows skyward in disbelief. Surely it wasn’t as simple as that! It couldn’t be, this existence of some sort of magic bullet smelted down and reformed into a five-minute disco groove. Still, I followed her advice. Sure enough, every mix that included “Music For Girls” received effusive praise with the recipient always singling out the Baxendale song as the highlight. In once joked online to a friend that it was his favorite song of all time, he just didn’t know it yet. After sampling it for twenty seconds on Amazon, he immediately ordered the CD. I don’t know that this song ever crossed over to college or any other charts in a significant way, but, for me, it was a hand grenade of musical addition. Throw it into a crowd and everyone within it’s range will have a piece of it forever lodged within them (though they’d be far more pleased with that outcome than the metaphor implies).

As the song says, this is the good stuff.

Baxendale, “Music For Girls”

(Disclaimer: Baxendale’s You Will Have Your Revenge appears to be out of print to me, and a cursory check also indicated a lack of digital retail presence for the song. Therefore, my intent is not to wrench food from the mouths of the wailing babes that need support by the members of the band or even those reared by the accursed souls who toil elsewhere within the villainous music industry. I want to share a song that I don’t believe can be purchased in a way that fairly compensates the good guys. However, if someone with due authority contacts me to request demand, suggest or otherwise discuss its removal, its existence on my little corner of the Web will be but a memory. Honest.)