This mixtape is called 1979

A few months back I created a timeline feature so I could get a visual of both the years that were represented in these mixes as well as the number of songs from said years. I was motivated only by the questions "can I do it?" and "I wonder what it will look like?"

When stylizing the timeline I felt like it needed another bit of context so I added a reference mark for the year I was born: 1979. On completion I noted that my timeline contained no songs from that year.

Every so often I would check back on the timeline (mainly to make sure it was still working) and kept noticing that I’d still yet to use a song from arguably the most important year of my life. Perhaps making a mix with only songs from 1979 would be a fun prompt?

And now a few words on audio quality and process

I am not an audiophile. I am not an audiophile to the point where I have perhaps taken pride in the fact that audio formats and expensive stereo equipment mean little to me. I have a friend who’s dad has a counter on his record player so he knows exactly how many revolutions it has done so he can replace his needle in a timely manner. As a nerd I can appreciate this but as someone who just wants to listen to some songs this seems like a vibe killer.

A running joke between my dad and I is “vinyl is so much warmer”. This gets tossed in conversation to poke fun at people who we feel give more of a shit about their equipment and/or record collection than the songs coming out of it. In retrospect it just sounds like I’m being a snob about what I view as snobbism which just ends up just being another form of snobbery.

Why do I bring any of this up? Well I suppose I want to broach the fact that eleven out of the fifteen songs on this mix come from records. If you’ve hung out in my living room you know that a significant amount of space is dedicated to records. It makes me kinda look like a “vinyl is warmer” type of person… The reality is that I started buying records because they were cheap. In the early 90’s I owned a DiscMan but I still bought a lot of records because I could usually get 4-5 records for the price of one CD.

There was also a neverending internal debate regarding the convenience of skipping directly to tracks versus discovering more bands/songs. So especially when I was trying to learn about bands/albums from the 60s, 70s and 80s it often made more sense to grab a bunch of records than to pin all my hopes on a single ‘remastered’ CD. Fast forward to 2022 and I look like a rejected character from High Fidelity.

When researching this particular mix I hit up this page and made notes of which albums I owned. I realized that I owned a sizable number of them on record so I pulled them out and gave them repeated listens. In addition to this I researched and streamed several albums I was unfamiliar with. Life long learner y’all!

In regard to audio quality I just want to mention that I’ve attempted to level out the songs so they aren’t sonically all over the place. Even though I am not an audiophile this process has taught me a lot about audio waveforms and compression in digital versus analog formats. I think at this point I’m supposed to have an opinion on it all but I really don’t. I can visually (not audibly) recognize the difference and conceptually understand what is going on. However, I don’t have the energy to defend one over the other.

What I do know is that the mix of records, cds and digital on this mix meant putting a bit more work into sonic cohesion. And while I did work to remove some of the “hiss” from the records I only removed a few “skips/pops”. I started to remove all of them from one song but it was a record that I inherited from Serena’s mom and it just didn’t feel right…

Cuz you know… vinyl is warmer.