Life Is a Mix Tape, Part 2: The Albums

"tonight, i feel like my whole body is made out of memories. i'm a mix tape, a cassette that's been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape."

-rob sheffield

sometimes one song just isn’t enough; sometimes a whole album is tied to a memory. hearing any song from that album will bring me back, but it also works the other way, too. i may randomly think of something that happened and then really want to listen to the album that accompanies it. (the playlist at the bottom has selections from each of the albums.)
8 dark side of the moon – pink floyd: besides being an excellent album on its own, this cd is tied to my freshman year in college. we would often put this on at night, on repeat, to sleep to. funny side note: i recently re-bought this album because it had been lost or stolen long ago. i popped it into the cd player and about two songs in, i found myself getting sleepy. talk about your pavlovian responses.
8 sublime – sublime: college, theatre department parties, jono and greyton’s house. jono and greyton were roommates and theatre students a year ahead of me. they had the best house for parties – two stories, sprawling wrap-around porch, and neighbors who were either not very close to the house, or at every party anyway, so they didn’t mind the noise. it was also at the top of a hill (mountain, really) and though it sucked to get up there in the winter, it was a very zen-like area with woods on two sides of the house. every single party started the same way; once enough party-goers had arrived, the “circle of death” table was set up with a pitcher and a few decks of cards, a few joints were rolled, the keg tapped, and this album put on. usually there were a few discs in the changer that rotated around, but this album we listened to straight through, beginning to end, before switching the music. those were good times – i don’t have a single bad or even boring memories from those parties. (note to my mom, in case you’re reading this: i had nothing to do with the pot – that was all jono and greyton, i promise. i stuck to the drinking games and laughing at the fools that couldn't hold their liquor.)
8 when i woke – rusted root: senior year of high school and freshman year of college. rusted root is a folk-funk-hippie-accoustic-fusion band from pittsburgh. because morgantown was only a hour or so away, they used to play every thursday night at the nyabinghy dance hall. (memo to me: there needs to be an entire blog dedicated to the ‘binghy at some point…) because we knew a few of the bouncers – or, more accurately, because i knew a few people who knew a few bouncers – we were let in even though we were underage. we only ever came to see root, and we didn’t try to drink any alcohol while we were there, so mostly they let us get away with it. new year’s eve 1995 found john, dale, and i at the annual root show in pittsburgh, and then at a party at a friend of dale’s sister’s. it was a fun night, even though i spent large chunks of the party making sure the stoners weren’t feeding marijuana to the friend’s parents’ great dane.
8 discography – pet shop boys: i’m not sure why, but this album played non-stop throughout my sophomore year in college. it seemed like whenever john, dale, melinda, and i were in a car together, this album was playing. it didn’t matter whose car, because we all had a copy. it was the default bgm to our wanderings.
8 greatest hits – bob marley: i would like to preface this by saying i love bob marley – quite a lot, actually. however, since it was one of the very few cd’s we could agree on in adventure ocean (the kids' center) on the serenade, we listened to it a lot. incessantly. over and over and over. rob was the worst offender; he always put it on, and we always seemed to work together. it finally got to the point where i took it out of the cd changer and hid it for a couple of weeks.
8 fear – toad the wet sprocket: sophomore and junior year of college. ferruso and i listened to this all the time. it’s another cd that became default bgm. mostly, though, it reminds me of the puppeteers of america festival in ohio. this and an “awesome eighties” cd were in heavy rotation that weekend. we met famous artists and puppeteers, we got rave reviews for a performance we slapped together for a cabaret night, i sliced open my thumb with a stolen outback steak knife whilst carving a coconut out of a nerf ball, we got through some of the lamer performances by loading our travel mugs with zima and sour candy (we couldn’t find any jolly ranchers on short notice), and we met all kinds of fantastically random people just by playing uno in the downstairs lobby. excellent times.
8 play – moby: for a month and a half, while i worked at disney and lived in clermont, this cd was stuck in the player of my car. i couldn’t fish it out and i couldn’t afford to get it fixed. the player was stuck; i couldn’t turn it off, i couldn’t change the volume or the track, and i couldn’t switch it back to the radio. it’s a really, really good thing that this was the cd that got stuck. (and that it was at a decent volume, come to think of it.) it’s one of the (like 5) albums i have no trouble listening to straight through, and it’s a testament to the quality of this album that i never got sick of it and that it remains one of my all-time favorites.
8 elephunk - black eyed peas:splendour of the seas, the sob (that’s the staff and officer bar, thank you). there are many different types of people working on ships: people of different nationalities, from different walks of life, who speak many different languages. it’s no surprise, then, that there was some dispute over the music to be played in the sob at night. for whatever reason, this album was the one everyone agreed on, so it was played almost every night squished somewhere between the british punk rock, romanian trance, and morroccan pop music (most of which i quite liked, actually…).

8 the lion king soundtrack: this is pretty self-explanatory, unless you don’t know about my stint performing at disney. i did both lolk (legend of the lion king) and folk (festival of the…) from the summer of ‘98 till the summer of ’03. legend closed in 2002 (to make way for a 3-d movie – great planning, eisner; way to take away the most popular attraction in the park), but i continued doing shows at folk till i was (wrongly) fired in ’03. (i got my job back… eventually. that’ll have to be a blog at some point, too.) anyway, due to the fact that i heard the soundtrack on a daily basis (at least 9 shows a day at legend, 4 at festival) it is permanently ingrained in my head, along with all corresponding choreography. everytime i hear the songs, i see the choreography in my head; because i knew 5 tracks (roles) at legend, i participated in every scene at some point. i’m pretty sure, given a stage and the appropriate puppets, i could still do either show pretty well, including things i was never trained in. it’s also my curse; the lion king soundtrack follows me. wherever i go, it’ll pop up to annoy me. true stories: 1. we were in skagway, alaska, and headed into a shopping center to get lunch at one of the cafes. as we walked through, “can you feel the love tonight” by elton john came over the loud speakers. really? alaska? and 2. in vegas, rob and i walked into the first casino to “circle of life”. jeez, people, let me have a vacation! there are many more instances, but i’ve done my best to block them out.
8note: the quote at the beginning of this blog is from the book love is a mix tape by rob sheffield - a brilliant memoir of life and love by a contributing editor of rolling stone. it's lovely and sad and inspiring and funny and real, and i'm going to keep bugging you until you go read it.

new mix tape: