It’s kinda nice, since we can’t go out to restaurants (or don’t anyway, which amounts to the same thing), to feel like I’m getting several gourmet meals a week, since we’re getting 3 HelloFresh dinners every Saturday and I live with a gourmet chef. Or at least a husband who likes to try new things and loves to cook. Win-win for everything but my waistline. Tonight, he made mushroom risotto with fresh al dente green beans…it was super yummy! Creamy and crunchy in just the right combination. So far, there have only been two recipes that we thought were sort of meh…everything else has been delicious. And since I really don’t cook hardly at all anymore, it’s been a lovely way to enjoy my husband’s talents and give us a dinnertime together.
I decided to start purging songs from my Spotify list the other day just to get it down to a more manageable level, make sure the songs on it were really all ones I love, and to be able to add more later without them getting totally lost in the mix. I had a tendency a few years ago to just add entire albums of artists I liked, without listening to them carefully first, and now I’m weeding out the ones that aren’t truly keepers. Generally speaking, I love my Spotify list. I listen to it all the time, at work, in the car, when I’m cleaning, or home alone. I listen to the one that Martin made for me for Christmas an awful lot, too, but that one only has 32 songs on it *heart* and several of them have already been added to my main list because I love them so much.
When I started the purge, I had 2108 songs on my main list. I put them in order by year and started going through them from the first songs I ever added, to present. I’m in the middle of 2018 at the moment and I’ve already removed 408 songs. I’m back at it this evening for a little while, so I fully expect by the time I’m done to be well under 1500 songs. Still a ridiculously large number but hey, I’ve been around a long time and listened to and loved a LOT of music.
I used to make mix tapes all the time, back in the day, and I was a total nerd about making pretty covers for them AND keeping meticulous track with index cards and notebook lists of all the songs and artists on each of them. I still have a cassette tape holder on the wall that holds 100 cassettes. Most of them were made by me, but some were made FOR me as well. I don’t actually listen to them anymore, but at one point I had copied the majority of them onto DVDs and now much of that same music, plus lots and lots of newer stuff, is on my playlist.
I still have those boxes of index cards and notebooks full of music lists, in the closet, gathering dust. I just pulled them out and had a laugh. There are three boxes of index cards in alphabetical order. Each card has an artist listed at the top, and then a handwritten list of songs with a number that corresponds to the cassette tape they’re on. The first page in the notebook is title “Cassette Inventory, Liz Slaughter, from 1984 to Present”. 😀 All typed out neat and cleanly. There are 94 cassette tapes in the list, with the last 20 or so handwritten in at the end.
My cassettes were all named, and I was quite the inventor when it came to them. Here’s a very small sample:
- Music to give stomachfarts by
- Whaddaya want…wicker?!?
- Quiet noises in loud places
- Piano Fart
- Wired for Sound
- Purr-fect Mew-sic
- Music that melts in your mouth
- EASy listening
That last one, because of my initials, of course: EAS.
And then a page for each cassette, also typed (on my IBM Selectric II typewriter that I LOVED), which lists the artist and song title in order, and at the bottom of every page this information: who made the tape, and WHERE, and the month and year it was made, and the inspiration for the name of the mix. I’m such a giant nerd, it’s hard to comprehend. At the bottom of the page of the cassette titled “TAANSTAAFL” the last line reads: “Title from THERE AIN’T NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH (Thanks, Heinlein!)”. HAHAHAHA
At the back are also lists of all the tapes I made for other people. Just to be sure I didn’t repeat myself if I happened to make them more than one. I made them for my sister, my brother, my girlfriends, boyfriends, college roommates, miscellaneous relatives and friends and colleagues. There’s at least one for someone whose name I no longer recognize. I wonder if any of those tapes still exist. I suspect most people have long since pitched their cassettes and mix tapes. Except that when you think of the amount of love, effort and time that went into them, maybe not.
Maybe it’s time to let them go? Maybe not the cassettes themselves, but the obvious evidence of my musical OCD tendencies. Haaa. Although, I kind of think this stuff is hilarious and too perfect to leave to my children to deal with and laugh over some day.