I’m trying to come up with a mix-CD for Justin in DC. This is about the 103rd version that I’ve worked on in the last 4 days but I keep changing it up before I put it in the envelope. I get everything just how I think I want it, then take it home and listed to it and find it sounds too whiney. Or too sappy. Or some transition sounds terrible. Themes and transitions are important, ya know? This last one is kind of coming naturally: mostly songs about transitions and living in the south.
Reminds me of one of my favorite movie quotes:
To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with “Got to Get You Off My Mind,” but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and…oh, there are loads of rules.
