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 … Continue reading One for Friday: Baxendale, “Music For Girls”

Part of the job of the Music Director at the college radio station during my days as a student was providing brief reviews of all the new releases. These upper left hand were handwritten onto little labels, approximately three inches by half-an-inch, that were then affixed to the upper left corner of the album cover. The limited space necessitated extreme brevity in the reviews (except for a couple of Music Directors I can think of who had remarkably compact handwriting that was also so legible it looked like it was produced by a special typewriter) making it sort of the … Continue reading One for Friday: Debbie Harry, “Liar Liar”