My daughter recently created a Spotify playlist that includes songs that remind her of being a child while my mixCDs played in the van as we drove about town and traversed the roads of the West. She tried to capture the range of music that my myriad mixCDs contained. She named the playlist “Feels like driving around in the Toyota Sienna.”
This was a fun experience for me. The playlist is very long. It took me about three days of working in the yard to finish listening to the entirety of it. Song titles span from the 1960’s through well into the 21st Century. It is very eclectic, as my mixCDs were, and as my current Spotify, Napster, and Qobuz playlists are. My current playlists contain newer music and change up quite a bit as I tend to tire of listening to the same music over and over again….well, except for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album.
Sometimes as parents we don’t fully realize how much our interests and tastes have influenced our children until they are adults living away from home and implementing some of those interests and tastes. All of my children listen to music that I played as they were growing up, but the songs and artists vary with each child according to their individual tastes. I love music and would prefer listening to music as opposed to watching television so they got an earful of my music through the years.
I’m trying to remember when I started creating mixtapes. At what age? I think I was in my junior high years when I began my love affair with mixtapes. But I don’t think I made very many because I was used to listening to the radio and I liked the majority of the songs that were played at the time. During my freshman year of college in January 1984 a new radio station made it’s debut in the Salt Lake City metro. It’s station letters were KCGL and the genre was 80’s New Wave. When I came home from school in the Spring of 1984 my older sister introduced me to the new station and I fell in love. Because I attended college in a small town that mostly played country music—that I DO NOT have an affinity for—I made lots of mixtapes the summer of 1984 to take with me in the Fall when I returned to college.
I also found at this time of mixtape mania that I prefer playlists with eclectic songs and artists. I grew up in an era where there were first 8-track tapes, then vinyl records, then cassette tapes, then CDs, and finally digital music where it was easy to take songs from the various albums that you were forced to listen to the entirety of and create your own playlists with the songs that you preferred. You didn’t have to include the songs from the album that you didn’t really jive with.
By the time my children were young, I was making mixCDs and designing labels with the song names to adhere to the discs. I kept these in CD cases in my van. My husband is also a music aficionado and fortunately our musical tastes align, so we have a very large CD collection. The CD albums were for playing in the house. The mixCDs were for playing in the van. It was especially fun when you could illegally download other people’s music from music sharing websites. I found a lot of my beloved 80’s New Wave songs that I then added to my mixCDs.
When we would make the long drives between Phoenix and Salt Lake City in the summers my children heard their fair share of my mixCDs. In fact, my oldest son once quipped that when he would hear a mixCD song when he was older and the disc jockey would announce the name of the band he would think “Oh, that’s who sings that song?” At some point they would realize that a commonly used phrase such as, “How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?” was really from Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall; or that the phrase,“ The grabbing hands grab all they can” is from Depeche Mode’s Everything Counts.
My guess is that my grandchildren will experience what my children do in regards to the music that their parents listen to as they are growing up and it will create a sense of nostalgia for them. The Circle of Life.
