The Tubes "What Do You Want From Life?"

We were like twins, born 8 years apart.

My college girlfriend had an older sister who was married.  And her husband and I had this weirdly parallel existence.

Which was cool for me, because I got to see what life would be like for me in a few years.

He was in TV production, and I was just graduating college ready to start making videos.  He took me to a studio where he worked, and showed me what was cutting edge technology, never before seen by me---computer animation.  I got career advice and encouragement, with a healthy dose of reality (finding work is hard), doled out by someone who'd moved through life with a temperament and style similar to mine.

I also got to see what life was like, in the past.  Sort of.

Because he was 8 years older than me, he grew up with music that had come and gone before my musical awakening.  Sure, I hadn't missed out on The Beatles and The Stones---I could go back to bands like that---but what about the nooks and crannies of 70s weirdness that had already slipped into obscurity by the mid-1980s?

He was a prolific cassette-tape-maker, and though I'd made mix tapes before, I really upped my game, after seeing the care that he put into both the track listing, and the package design.

Mix tapes are a hazy memory in this (digital age) day and age, as is that girlfriend.  But I heard this Tubes track the other day, and knew that if I had taken a different (dating) path, "What Do You Want From Life" (which I first heard on one of his awesome mix tapes) probably wouldn't have registered in my mind at all. 

But instead, it invokes the warm analog nostalgia of cassette-tapes and video production and college girlfriends' families and musical friendships made and faded.


Hear the song on Youtube.

Tift Merritt “Mixtape”

You can find lots of nostalgic love for vinyl. Audiophiles love to go on and on about the superior quality of sounds found on records. And Album-ophiles lament the loss of LPs, claiming the art of the cover and the weight of the wax are as essential to the experience, as the music itself.

But you don’t find the same kind of romance for cassettes, do you?

Certainly, the same nostalgic reasoning doesn’t hold up. The audio quality on a cassette is poor, and degrades quickly. And cassettes are actually blamed for the death/dearth of the album cover as an art form.

But Tift Merritt and I are of like minds.

On “Mixtape” she brings back the romance to cassettes. For all the limitations of these little reel to reels, they have one true, head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest advantage:

Mix tapes with homemade covers.

You can’t make your own vinyl compilation. It’s just not technically feasible for the average person.

And sure, you can make an iTunes playlist, but you can’t lovingly craft an iTunes playlist and then physically present it to someone. It’s not a thing---it’s just files. And playlists, even burned CDs, are made to be randomized, to have tracks skipped over, to be embellished or deleted.

A mixed cassette is a collage that can tell a story, based on the songs and the song order. A track listing matters.

Then there's the sides. A Side and B Side. You can’t have sides on an iTunes playlist, for crying out loud.

And yes, some vinyl enthusiasts sniff at the idea of cassette album art. But when you make a mixtape with a homemade cover, you tap into a charm that’s not a part of vinyl or disc or MP3 or 8-Track.

I have dozens of cassettes, made by me or given to me as gifts, in the basement. I’ve probably made hundreds in my day. But since the world went digital, the practice has fallen by the wayside of my life.

Thanks for the reminder, Tift: Time to press rewind, rewind.