"it's like i wrote every not with my own finger"

There is very little method to the madness. I am no DJ in some swanky club, expertly mixing songs. I have no experience as a producer, so I haven’t had extensive experience in determining how to best place a song among others on a cd in order to achieve some sort of concordance. I often find myself struggling for gifts that wont cost a fortune and gas money, and my first inclination is to craft a delightful mix that will suit the recipient’s current situation. Whether it be a puzzling predicament or something as simple as elation. However, some people think it’s cheap to just make a mix tape as a gift. The same who think the most efficient way to show somebody that you care is to shove twenty bucks in a Hallmark creation and scribble an “i <3 u!” with their name on the inside. If you are especially cared for, I have found that you receive cards that make noise when you open them. Disney Princess songs, Jimmy Buffet, whatever you’d like in card form. Word on the gift-givers’ circuit is that you can even record your own voice. Surely, that would be the ultimate expression of true feelings for a person.
Naturally, I disagree entirely. If I make a mix CD, you may be certain that every song has been chosen for a reason, regardless of the haste or deliberation with which is was chosen. Especially on the occasions that you receive my mixes as gifts. While some just slap a set of songs in mixed up order on a 10-CD block and shoot them out at friends with a specially crafted iTunes track list, in which case it’s a different story. If your track list is hand-written in special ink with a paragraph’s worth of explanation for the selection of each of twenty one songs, and the CD has been decorated carefully and precisely with seven colors of Sharpie markers, it’s got a different feel about it.
In fact, as I found myself at a loss for a birthday gift for a comrade that I would have ranked among my best, my highly undeveloped method collapsed into “Girl, you have fifteen minutes to jam some songs on a cd and make it look pretty.” Ergo, to the computer I flew, dragging songs from about every other band name as it was listed alphabetically. The moment of compilation never seemed to be a suitable time to consider editing, leading to the difficult cuts that would have to be made later. Having begun with A.F.I.’s Decemberunderground CD and made it successfully to 1997’s ...A Better View of the Rising Moon, I wound up sifting through 63 songs destined for a cd that would hold roughly 22. The 1.2 hour limit could not be breached by any exception, forcing me to eliminate Sam Phillips and Telexx, two artists that wound up making the preliminary selection by chance alone.
Scrolling through the extensive list, deleting a song here and there, it became increasingly more difficult to pick and choose. How could I just erase The Scene Aesthetic's "Boats and Birds" cover when it was practically the anthem of our summer? A peculiar choice of anthem, yes, seeing as it failed to breach the bpm of anything one might consider “up-beat” or peppy, but our anthem nonetheless. A song about codependency and trust that really doesn’t end with the brightest prospects, when put in even the cheeriest arrangement, would logically stand alone in a room of anthems. However, despite what the album cover says and regardless of the copyright information provided on the insert, the listener makes the music. As the mix creator, the responsibility fell upon me to make the point. I began surrounding the song with others that held similar meanings or at least places in our hearts, and a natural order began to form, as it is wont to do in these matters.
Between Eisley’s magical account of a day in “Trolley Wood” and the hopeless end that Andrew McMahon finds in “Cavanaugh Park,” a journey takes place, not without its own share of ups and downs. Beginning with Eisley, my last minute gift became an account—practically a testament—to our friendship. The tone of songs began to shift up and down as their meanings overflowed into the surrounding music, writing a story I could only have made by accident.
Having settled on my first set of six songs, it was time to move on. When you are selecting music from your own library, it is surprisingly difficult to keep someone else in mind and discount your personal preferences for even a moment. However, anticipating their reactions and providing appropriate music to accompany it is what these gifts are all about. Therefore, after starting off with a thoroughly depressing selection of songs, it would be cruel not to lighten the mood with some acoustic Relient K and the spastic yet delightful rhythms of Nevershoutnever, two selections that would be hard put to evoke anything but grins and giggles.
“My eyes, they don’t see the way they used to,” wails the “Heregoesnothin” singer, a lyric that I could only hope would serve as a climax to the journey this CD was taking. Our friendship, not unlike the CD, had a faltering and generally unpromising start, slowly picking up momentum as we learned the characters of each other. At a point, though, two personalities such as ours are forced to either abandon or jump recklessly with it. The title of “Heregoesnothin” in itself depicts our reaching of that point in our friendship, and the positive outcome carries on into the next song: a pop-punk, ghetto-charged Cobra Starship hit. I rounded off the “golden age” of our friendship with a promise from Five For Fighting, ensuring the important place that it held in my heart not only would last, but required my friend’s presence for mere survival.
All great empires, though, must fall at some point. Egypt fell to the Kush, and Rome went down in flames, and as two mere humans with one great connection, we stood little less of a chance. As “Cavanaugh Park” made the list, there were no other places for my CD to go. It was the end. I read down the track list one, final time, and clicked “Burn.” That was it. Listening to the final progression of songs into the vital lines of one of Something Corporate’s greatest power ballads, our friendship came to its conclusion. The lyrics confess that “there was never any place for someone like me to be totally happy. Now I’m running out of clock and that ain’t a shock. Some things never do change.” It became apparent as those words reverberated through my headphones that we had regressed to square one.

Once the songs had been whittled down to a mere twenty one, the point became clear. Every mix CD, whether it’s be carefully composed or carelessly thrown together, has a feel. You listen to the songs, and you hear how they run into each other. The lyrics coincide in every direction and convey messages, both intended and accidental. The magic of the mix CD is those accidents. The intended mood can put the listener in a place that changed the big picture that Imogen Heap meant to convey in “Hide and Seek.” And that’s okay. They say that strong personalities clash, but that doesn’t mean they don’t acclimate first. Something that began so rocky and became so seemingly perfect was doomed from the start.
I scrawled the list of painstakingly chosen songs on graph paper to ensure maximum legibility and neatness and cooler the CD front with my beloved Sharpie markers, finally stuffing the CD into a pre-bubble-wrapped envelope. I carefully folded the track list and slid it in beside the purple jewel case, and sealed the gift with the self-adhesive tape line. What better gift is there to give than closure for these things?


--MRS 2/11/09

Ps. This is entirely fictional. The track list is real, the meaning is not. It's a CD that I made for someone else and it's got nothing to do with not being friends anymore. So...I made it up for Creative Writing class. Sshh!