Music To Warm a House By, Volume One 1996 The title should make it fairly clear what kind of party this tape was made for. The house in question had already been heated adequately for me; I’d been living there for around a year-and-a-half at the time of the party. However, I had new roommates, including my fellow 90FM alumnus . Since I was anticipating a more social atmosphere with the new collection of residents (marathon sessions of simultaneously smoking pot, playing Nintendo hockey and listening to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness were the nightly default plan of the … Continue reading Watch out! You might get what you’re after

…where you used to play pinball 2005 This tape was made as a part of the flurry of mix activity that preceded a road trip to Athens, Georgia. Selections from this batch of cassettes have made prior appearances as part of this process of purging. This particular tape was purely an exercise in nostalgia. I thought back to my days as an impressionable student at 90FM and tried to come up with some of the artists and songs, in roughly chronological order, that I connected with most dramatically at that time. Basically, I’d been concentrating so much on discovering new … Continue reading You stop in the old cafe where you used to play pinball

CMJ Anniversary Compilation III 1989 It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, so a quick refresher might be in order. When I replaced my car stereo last spring, I found myself without a cassette player in my motor vehicle for the first time in years, with little to no likelihood that I’d have that sort of device again. While there’s a couple cassette players in the house, it’s not likely I’ll opt for those over the wall of CDs we have available of the wondrous, continuous personalized radio station available on my iPod. So, I decided to … Continue reading Funny how I find myself in love with you

Sheboygan Confidential 1998 This has come up before. I had a long-standing tradition with my old college roommate of following the annual announcement of the Academy Award nominations by convening as quickly as possible to engage in what we termed “instant Oscar predictions.” This was fine in college, but became more difficult as pesky adulthood cast us to different corners of our mutual home state. Of course, during many of those years I was always looking for an excuse to take a roadtrip and compile a new mix tape for the occasion. So another part of the tradition for me … Continue reading Feelin’ better than yesterday and worse than tomorrow