Sean O’Kana from California wrote in to ask about the art of making mix tapes that have a running theme.
Man, this makes my day. My generation grew up on cassettes and CDs, so mix tapes in my day really were tapes, not digitized playlists.
I remember sitting on my skateboard on the bedroom floor beside a giant black boombox. I’d load a favorite tape in the left deck, then click an empty cassette into the right deck… transferring all the songs you wanted onto one tape took hours. Back then the whole thing took so long that we had time to think about which song should go next while the current one was recording. Or we’d sit with finger poised over the “record” button, waiting for the local radio station to finally play that one song this tape needs. Ahhh, memories.
It does me good to think that people are still making mix tapes, even if those tapes take the form of iTunes playlists or whatever.
So you want to make mix tapes with cohesive themes, right? That’s an art in itself.
The theme of a mix tape can be about the sound of the music itself, or it can be a list of songs that make you feel a certain way. It could be about songs that have similar lyric themes… it could even be something entirely separate from the music and lyrics themselves. Check it out:
Music
One obvious way to get a mix tape together is to just pick a cluster of tunes that share something sonic in common. A few ideas off the top of my head:
- Awesome songs shorter than three minutes
- Most underrated punk bands mix
- Best surf rock guitar solos
- Tom Waits’s loudest, growliest growls
- Bass clarinet jams
These are no joke, man. I could make you a sick 90-minute mix tape of bass clarinet jams. Don’t think I won’t.
Mood
Songs that make you feel a certain way. These might have to do with a specific time of day, a whole season, or any other state of mind.
- After-dark songs
- Best songs to listen to during hard times
- Workout mix–songs to get you pumped
- Best songs for summertime
Lyric
A lyric-based mix tape could be a collection of tunes that share certain ideas, concepts, or topics in common.
- Best bitter breakup songs
- Songs with amazing lyric imagery
- Songs on the theme of missing someone
Other
Any other connection you can make between tunes.
- Guilty pleasures mix
- Edgy tunes from living jazz legends over 70 years old
- Songs that make me think of [the person you’re making the tape for]
- Nashville vs. Memphis, Round Three
- Songs that will stick in your head even though you hate them
Really the idea is just to find some kind of common thread running through all these songs–something that connects them all. It can be something obvious, or it can be something subtle. You could even give your finished mixtape to friends and neighbors and say, “First person to correctly guess the theme I was going for on this mixtape gets a free dinner on me.”
If you want to be extra-sly about it, make just one copy of the mixtape and casually give it to someone you find fetching. And don’t make the theme too hard to guess…
Misc. Mix Tape Tips
- If you’re making this “mix tape” as an iTunes play list or something like that, slap a time limit on it. Cassettes used to be 60 or 90 minutes long.
- Make your mix as a sequence, not as a random list. Pour yourself into it. Give some thought to the way each song flows into the next.
- For songwriters and musicians in general, making a mix tape can be a way of connecting the dots between different styles and musicians that you like. It’s part of the process–bit by bit, it can help reveal clues about the kind of music you want to make.