It’s another gray Monday morning following a gloomy few days, so here’s a fresh start to the week: a Spotify mix of some of our favorite local artists (all of whom have been seen here recently, on our fair blog). Not like any of you necessarily need cheering up, but back when I was young enough to make these sorts of things on a dual tapedeck instead of a computer, idly sliding songs from here to there, a mix cassette was one of the things my friends and I would exchange to cheer each other up; to commemorate something, a tearful breakup, a battle of the bands lost to that crappy ska group from the other school (the one that always seemed to get an unfair proportion of votes) or an end of a year. It’s not too dramatic to say that mix tapes changed my life. The first time I heard anything but your requisite “Love Me Do” Beatles songs was on a mix my friend Caroline made in middle school – it included all parts of “Revolution,” and it turned my world upside down. I wore that thing down so much I was re-tooling it with a pencil daily; I finally had my stepmom take me to the mall to buy me the full White Album. Luckily, she’s a Beatles fan and was more than happy to oblige and fill in any Fab Four gaps in my brain. I can credit mix tapes to my discovery of Led Zepplin, Television, The Specials, Indigo Girls and so many more; I can still see the way my friends had written the song titles on that little white piece of glossy cardboard, sometimes smudged with ink fingerprints. Even broken, most of them were hard to let go.
I so miss when music discovery was a push-and-pull between friends. Pass this mix – or any other one you make today – to a pal. Let’s nourish that ghost.
Click here to subscribe to this playlist & click through the gallery to learn about some of the folks on it :::
Lockeland Springsteen 