Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time

published	2007 by Crown
binding	Hardcover
isbn	1400083028 (isbn13: 9781400083022)
pages	240
setting	Charlottesville, VA
description	What is love? Great minds have been grappling with this question throughout the ages, and in the modern era, they have come up with many different ans...more [close] What is love? Great minds have been grappling with this question throughout the ages, and in the modern era, they have come up with many different answers. According to Western philosopher Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield. Her paisan Frank Sinatra would add the corollary that love is a tender trap. Love hurts. Love stinks. Love bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you to show them. But the answer is simple: Love is a mix tape. In the 1990s, when “alternative” was suddenly mainstream, bands like Pearl Jam and Pavement, Nirvana and R.E.M.—bands that a year before would have been too weird for MTV- were MTV. It was the decade of Kurt Cobain and Shania Twain and Taylor Dayne, a time that ended all too soon. The boundaries of American culture were exploding, and music was leading the way. It was also when a shy music geek named Rob Sheffield met a hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl named Renée, who was way too cool for him but fell in love with him anyway. He was tall. She was short. He was shy. She was a social butterfly. She was the only one who laughed at his jokes when they were so bad, and they were always bad. They had nothing in common except that they both loved music. Music brought them together and kept them together. And it was music that would help Rob through a sudden, unfathomable loss. In Love Is a Mix Tape, Rob, now a writer for Rolling Stone, uses the songs on fifteen mix tapes to tell the story of his brief time with Renée. From Elvis to Missy Elliott, the Rolling Stones to Yo La Tengo, the songs on these tapes make up the soundtrack to their lives. Rob Sheffield isn’t a musician, he’s a writer, and Love Is a Mix Tape isn’t a love song- but it might as well be. This is Rob’s tribute to music, to the decade that shaped him, but most of all to one unforgettable woman. [close]
date added	01-31-07 edit book

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Heather rated it:

11/09/07

Read in May, 2007

Love Is A Mix Tape just absolutely knocked my socks off.

I devoured this book in one weekend and enjoyed every single page, heartily. This is ostensibly a book about mix tapes, and looking back at a life spent seeing the world in a series of 45-minute vignettes (then, of course, you flip the tape over). Rob Sheffield has penned an honest (yet wildly entertaining) book that affected me more deeply than any book I've read in recent memory, woven throughout with a genuine and bleeding love for m...more Love Is A Mix Tape just absolutely knocked my socks off.

I devoured this book in one weekend and enjoyed every single page, heartily. This is ostensibly a book about mix tapes, and looking back at a life spent seeing the world in a series of 45-minute vignettes (then, of course, you flip the tape over). Rob Sheffield has penned an honest (yet wildly entertaining) book that affected me more deeply than any book I've read in recent memory, woven throughout with a genuine and bleeding love for music. It's electric.

The meta-theme of the book is great love, great loss, and the soundtrack: his relationship and marriage to Renee, a girl who he says was "in the middle of everything, living her big, messy, epic life, and none of us who loved her will ever catch up with her." Rob loved Renee, and chronicles that here beautifully from their first meeting to her sudden death at 31.

Parts of the book are evisceratingly intimate. Sometimes I felt almost too close to his darkest and most intimate moments, and it's hard to phrase this right but -- because I knew so much of the music that weaves throughout their stories, I almost felt like I had a personal stake. I kept thinking that it was surprising to find a story so real and honest and intimate when I initially picked this up because, duh, it's about mix tapes.

If you don't like reading about other people's love stories, you should still 100% read this book. Renee was his muse, but his passion (and hers) is thoroughly and unabashedly music -- and there is some absolutely fantastic stuff in here. He writes of their relationship, "We had nothing in common, except we both loved music. It was the first connection we had, and we depended on it to keep us together. We did a lot of work to meet in the middle. Music brought us together." They were both music writers and radio DJs, they fell in love hard and married young. They made lots and lots of fabulous mix tapes, and each chapter begins with a reprinted tracklist from one cassette from that era in their lives.

This is a man after my own heart. How could I do anything but love a man who starts chapter 14 with: "Every time I have a crush on a woman, I have the same fantasy: I imagine the two of us as a synth-pop duo." He goes on to elaborate how she is in the front ("tossing her hair, a saucy little firecracker"), stealing the show and he is hidden in the back behind his Roland JP8000 keyboard, "lavishing all my computer blue love on her."He even lists all the best band names he's come up with for their synth-pop duo: Metropolitan Floors, Indulgence, Angela Dust.

And you should hear him wax poetic about mix tapes. Be still my heart. Rob writes, "There are all kinds of mix tapes. There is always a reason to make one." He then gives his examples:
The Party Tape
I Want You
We're Doing It? Awesome!
You Like Music, I Like Music, I Can Tell We're Going To Be Friends
You Broke My Heart And Made Me Cry and Here Are Twenty or Thirty Songs About It
The Road Trip
Good Songs From Bad Albums I Never Want To Play Again

. . . and many more. "There are millions of songs in the world," he writes, "and millions of ways to connect them into mixes. Making the connections is part of the fun of being a fan." The book starts with Sheffield pulling out a box of old tapes and all throughout the book --from his childhood school dance recollections, to the first mixes he can remember making for Renee, to the ones that accompanied him in the dark days and months following her death-- the mix tapes and the songs are as much characters in this story as the actual people are.

Since each of us have our own completely sovereign and self-focused memories surrounding our favorite bands and favorite songs (the unique feelings, smells, companions, activities associated with them), there is something that I just find so ebullient about "seeing" all these bands and songs through the unique rubric of their lives. A MUST-READ....less

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Nickie rated it:

(review of isbn 1400083036)

02/05/08

Read in April, 2007

Finished Love is a Mix Tape from the previous post today. Seriously, loved it. And it’s funny how I really liked his literary voice throughout the book, but find his actual reading of it rather repugnant for some reason. Guess it clashes with my imagination’s ascribed voice and delivery.

There’s a tragedy I couldn’t have imagined here, led up to in such a way I was guessing and then it happened. Not going to spoil it but here’s an excerpt:

“I knew I would have to relearn how to lis...more Finished Love is a Mix Tape from the previous post today. Seriously, loved it. And it’s funny how I really liked his literary voice throughout the book, but find his actual reading of it rather repugnant for some reason. Guess it clashes with my imagination’s ascribed voice and delivery.

There’s a tragedy I couldn’t have imagined here, led up to in such a way I was guessing and then it happened. Not going to spoil it but here’s an excerpt:

“I knew I would have to relearn how to listen to music, and that some of the music we’d loved together I’d never be able to hear again. Every time I started to cry, I remembered how Renee used to say real life was a bad country song, except bad country songs are believeable and real life isn’t. Everybody knows what it’s like to derive while crying; feeling like a bad country song is part of why it sucks.”

Another that I liked:

“But for me, if we’re talking about romance, cassettes wipe the floor with MP3s. This had nothing to do with superstition, or nostalgia. MP3s buzz straight to your brain. That’s part of what I love about them. But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy, human bodies. The cassette is full of tape hiss and room tone; it’s full of wasted space, unnecessary noise. Compared to the go-go-go rhythm of an MP3, mix tapes are hopelessly inefficient.”

That’s rather why I like doing the radio. Usually I break it up like two cassettes, four sides. I like the chance to switch a feeling or genre. I like an end. And I like playing vinyl next to cds and then back again and having it come out the same but different. Standing out back of the station and listening to the music I just put on coming out of the radio in the night air, it sounds different than when I play it at home. And that’s why I love mixes from other people, it sounds different than I could have ever imagined.

“No matter how hard you listen, you can’t get down to the pure sound, not as it gets heard by impure flesh-and-blood ears. So instead of listening to the pure sound, you listen to a mix. When you try to play a song in your memory, and you remember how it goes, you’re just making an imperfect mix of it in your mind. Human sound is mutant sound. You listen, and you mutate along with the sound.”

Maybe it’s just because I love to read about other music obsessed folks like myself, to immediately relate to all the references and go Yeah! I just love the buildup of something that I get so much out of.

“What is love? Great minds have been grappling with this question through the ages, and in the modern era, they have come up with many different answers. According to the Western philosopher Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield. Her paisan Frank Sinatra would add the corollary that love is a tender trap. The stoner kids who spent the summer of 1978 looking cool on the hoods of their Trans Ams in the Pierce Elementary School parking lot used to scare us little kids by blasting the Sweet hit “Love Is Like Oxygen” - You get too much, you get too high, not enough and you’re gonna die. Love hurts. Love stinks. Love bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times all agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you to show them. But the answer is simple. Love is a mix tape.”...less

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Jonathan rated it:

01/31/08

Read in January, 2008

“We were just a couple of fallen angels, rolling the dice of our lives. We’d heard all the horror stories of early marriages and fast divorces and broken hearts. But we knew none of them would happen to us, because as Dexy’s Midnight Runners sang to Eileen, we were far too young and clever. What if we just decide not to fall apart?"

I was first taken by the rock critic Rob Sheffield's style and tone in his Rolling Stone reviews. Whether or not I agree, I just like the way he writes...more “We were just a couple of fallen angels, rolling the dice of our lives. We’d heard all the horror stories of early marriages and fast divorces and broken hearts. But we knew none of them would happen to us, because as Dexy’s Midnight Runners sang to Eileen, we were far too young and clever. What if we just decide not to fall apart?"

I was first taken by the rock critic Rob Sheffield's style and tone in his Rolling Stone reviews. Whether or not I agree, I just like the way he writes. So I decided to pick up this little jam of a memoir built on the solid rock of real romance that perched above the shifting sands in his life that are popular music.

Rob and Renée, his wife of five years or so, had a beautiful, easy chemistry. Neither knew that one would become a widower in such a short time. It hardly spoils anything to tell that Renée suffered a pulmonary embolism that had her gone in a minute, and Sheffield constructs his chapters around the mix tapes that they made together and for each other during their courtship and married life.

So many spots appear in the book where Sheffield could have gone sentimental or gushy, but he maintains the tone of a grieving, realistic man almost without fail. He's also nothing if not self-aware about the powers of music: "[Personics] was just another temporary technological mutation designed to do the same thing music always does, which is allow emotionally warped people to communicate by bombarding each other with pitiful cultural artifacts that in a saner world would be forgotten before they even happened.”

Along the way Sheffield of course ruminates about certain songs and artists, often to hilarious effect (see the section where he and Renée thought up names for their would-be synth-pop duo). These digressions always find their way back, as do his spot-on song and film references.

Sheffield remarks that no wisdoms or revelations come to the one grieving the loss of a lover, but he provides some thoughts just short of astute himself, and via the subtly funny and tragic vehicles of Jacqueline Kennedy ("the most famous widow of all, our Elvis, our Muhammad Ali") and his elders ("Aunt Peggy refused to allow indoor plumbing right up to her dying day, which was in 1987. Whenever anybody suggested indoor plumbing, she always said, ‘Sure, we’ll be drowned in our beds!’").

You emerge on the other side of this read with a genuine desire to know and befriend the dear Renée. You feel the loss right along with the author. Nothing more can be asked of the reader, so he doesn't. What Sheffield does do is pull no punches in this sad but sober retelling of "life and loss, one song at a time."...less

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jess rated it:

07/16/08

Read in July, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

spoiler: she dies

i'm feeling a lot of love, life & loss right now, so i thought, "What The Hell, Give It A Shot." and, well, this could be the hipster love story of the year... possibly that of the decade. littered with gratuitous references to the music of the 1990s, the uncensored grief of a sensitive hetero dude, the life of a quirky, curvy girl tragically cut short by an unexpected pulmonary embolism, all delivered straight from the keyboard of a Rolling Stone editor -- th...more spoiler: she dies

i'm feeling a lot of love, life & loss right now, so i thought, "What The Hell, Give It A Shot." and, well, this could be the hipster love story of the year... possibly that of the decade. littered with gratuitous references to the music of the 1990s, the uncensored grief of a sensitive hetero dude, the life of a quirky, curvy girl tragically cut short by an unexpected pulmonary embolism, all delivered straight from the keyboard of a Rolling Stone editor -- this book tallies up enough points to keep it on the "fave books" list for many socialite myspace pages for years to come.

okay! okay! i admit it! i boo-hooed, sobbed, snorted snot, and positively wept through entire chapters of this book! i read it out-loud to my sweetheart, choking every few words and probably providing a nearly unintelligible listening experience (she did not complain). however, this was not much of an accomplishment cause im a big ol tittybaby who loves to cry all day! i cry when puppies wrestle because it is so sweet, okay?! i read the whole damn thing aloud! it was so hard to read it out loud while i was crying! so, anyway, enough about my emotional shortcomings. it was contrived mostly, but i enjoyed the 90s nostalgia and the tragic saccharine tone. i was always been a sucker for the ill-fated romance, wasn't i?

the book did freak me out A LOT because rob & renee met one day before krista and i did (september 17 and september 18, respectively) and they got married the same day we did (july 13 --- by the way! i got gay-married!). also, renee was the same age (26) that i was when we got married. does this mean, uhm, that i'm going to die in five years of a pulmonary embolism at my sewing machine? not that long ago, i would have said HERE'S HOPING, FOLKS ! but actually, i guess only time will tell, and frankly, i hope not because i have a lot of shit to do. fortunately the book doesnt take itself so seriously so i dont think it has to stand as an foreshadowing omen of my death.

recommended: if you are bored and looking for an indie rock hetero love story set in the 1990s; if you cant get enuff romance from the pages of rolling stone but you love their style; if you wish you had found and lost the greatest love of your lifetime; warning: if you think you already HAVE found and lost the greatest love of your lifetime, this might just hit you *right there* maybe not in a good way. xoxxx...less

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Bryan rated it:

03/12/08

I really wanted to like this book, despite my mild dislike for Sheffield's writing in Rolling Stone magazine. While the story is heartbreaking -- he becomes a widower earlier than anyone should be allowed to -- I was expecting much more insight than what's provided in this slim tome (I read it in one sitting.)

The story boils down to this -- music nerd from Boston meets awesome Appalachian girl who is everything he isn't. You know where the story is heading after he is instantly smitten when ...more I really wanted to like this book, despite my mild dislike for Sheffield's writing in Rolling Stone magazine. While the story is heartbreaking -- he becomes a widower earlier than anyone should be allowed to -- I was expecting much more insight than what's provided in this slim tome (I read it in one sitting.)

The story boils down to this -- music nerd from Boston meets awesome Appalachian girl who is everything he isn't. You know where the story is heading after he is instantly smitten when she is the only other person in a University of Virginia bar to recognize that Big Star's second album is playing.

They make a connection and later, much to his surprise, they fall in love and get married. After his wife is tragically taken away from him he spends the final half of the book telling the reader over and over to the point of irritation how awesome his wife was.

While each chapter begins with a playlist of a mix tape he or his wife had made, Sheffield doesn't write enough about the songs on the tapes. Why did he select certain songs over others? What makes a good tape. For a man who made tapes for such mundane chores as washing the dishes and walking the dogs, it's a cop-out not to write about the music itself. Of course, that may not be a bad thing. You would think that someone who writes for Rolling Stone would have high standards for determining what makes a good song. Not Sheffield. To him, all music is great, from the Replacements to Journey to the J. Geils Band. Makes you wonder how he wound up writing for a national magazine. Unfortunately we never learn because Sheffield is too busy telling how awesome his wife was. I wanted at least some idea of how he climbed out of his grief to become a columnist for one of the most storied music magazines in the country.

Sheffield likes to liberally sprinkle his writing with pop culture references as a way to show cool and ironic he is, and this book is no exception. While sometimes the references make you smile, most of the time they come off like the junior high social outcast who tries to show how hip he is by making jokes about the Dukes of Hazzard or Star Trek.

...less

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Emilia rated it:

08/28/07

bookshelves: real-books

Read in August, 2007

recommends it for: just the really cool kids

Oh man, shucks.
I loved this book.
I could say that the story arc could have been stronger or that he could have talked about mixtapes more (even though he talked about them a lot, I never get sick of it). But I won't. I don't care about those things.

I care that I basically love this book way too much. There are many reasons.

1) I am a sucker for exercises in love and grief, which a lot of this book is--his wife died suddenly after they were married for like 5 years, and most of the b...more

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Erika rated it:

03/14/08

Read in March, 2008

i find i have a lot to say about this.
I loved this book, first for its size. i loved it secondly for its musical focus. within the first chapter i was enamored with musical taste, shown by setlists at the beginning of each chapter and similar to my own life story as told by music.
i appreciate and agree wholeheartedly with a musical connection to life and how sentimental it makes living through and then reliving heartfelt events. growing up my most prized posssession was the radio in my room...more

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Marie rated it:

05/05/08

recommends it for: sentimental sappy headed sappy suckers

If you've lost someone that you cared deeply for you know the frustration in not being able to express who that person was to others. The on going loss that comes from meeting new people and knowing they will never know this person (this HUGE part of your life) can seem cripiling at times. In some ways this book appears to be Sheffields attempt to make his wife known to us after her very early death. Personally, I don't think he succedded. His short lived marriage to her seemed sweet in a teen a...more

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Alison rated it:

08/10/07

bookshelves: memoirs

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in August, 2007

recommends it for: lovers, listeners, writers, people who like Pavement

"It's a fundamental human need to pass music around, and however the technology evolves, the music keeps moving."

Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time is a nice little book with a perfect title. It was written by Rob Sheffield who is a journalist, a music-lover, and a widower. The format of the book is to use actual mix tapes that he and his deceased wife put together to introduce a chapter. The chapters are reflections on their life together from when they met t...more

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Christopher rated it:

06/02/08

Read in May, 2008

recommends it for: everyone, especially music lovers

This book had a chance to be "the best book ever." I love the way Sheffield, now a journalist for Rolling Stone, structured the memoir (each chapter is written around reflections on one of the many mix tapes he made in his life) and his observations about music are honest and at times very funny:

"Christmas is like the 'Hey Jude' of holidays--every five years, at one-third the length, it would be a perfectly nice idea."

""You can't turn a mix CD off halfway t...more

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Catherine rated it:

03/26/08

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in March, 2008

I have always thought of the 90s as THE era for music. The stuff of genius was making it's way onto mainstream radio and the punk underground was thriving in a way I sadly don't think it ever will again. When I think about my high school and college years, I'd dare to say that virtually all of my memories, good and bad, are somehow connected to music. And who didn't spend hours upon hours shuffling through cassettes, fast-forwarding, rewinding, and two hours later producing the perfect mix ta...more

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Meredith rated it:

(review of isbn 1400083036)

05/14/08

Read in October, 2007

Before I review the book, I have to say that I'm not too big of a fan of Rob Sheffield's music reviews. For some reason, his style is different when he is in review mode. But, I really loved this book!

1. I am a music junkie, so I can appreciate a world in which the main characters are also music lovers.

2. I know the regional area in which the book takes place. I've been to many of the places mentioned and can appreciate the culture.

3. It's age relevant. While the two main character...more

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Kevin rated it:

03/22/08

Anybody who grew up in the 80s and 90s remembers making mix tapes. You made them for yourself, you made them for friends, you made them for her (or him, as the case may be). You took songs from records, cassettes, CDs, and the radio and mixed them into the order you wanted and, sometimes, you even had running commentary in the form of your own voice during the gaps or the DJ from the radio station from which you recorded the track.

But have you ever defined your life based on these recordings...more

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Abby rated it:

05/14/07

bookshelves: dorks

Read in May, 2007

recommends it for: people who like sounds and people

Once you get over that Rob Sheffield is the snarky guy with the black hair from such VH1 classics as I Love the 80s, I Love the 90s, I Love the 80s 2, and I Love the 90s 2 and that you were, you know, age seven through seventeen in the 90s and so don't know much of the music he talks about, you will love this book. Yes, it helps if you can dig up some Sleater-Kinney and Pavement for reference, but you can still feel it through the Top 40s ...more

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Rosie rated it:

05/11/07

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in April, 2007

I wanted to fall in love with this book. I am a girl who still has 20 or so mixed tapes-- actual mixed tapes-- from lost friends, lost loves, past lives, past dreams, rumbling around my car and house. In fact, I bought a new car a couple years ago that still featured a tape deck because of these mixed tapes. Music and writing were my life line for so long. And so I wanted to love this book the way that I love High Fidelity. The way I love to run to Itunes when a snippet of a song from a 9th...more

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Matt rated it:

02/18/08

Read in May, 2007

This is the kind of memoir I'd like to have written (albeit without the deceased wife). The only reason I didn't give it another star is that Sheffield and I don't really have the same musical tastes. Still, the premise and writing are great.

I've had a few conversations with friends in the last year or so about the long-lost art of the mix tape, which has been delivered a death-blow by the digital age. Burning a CD mix just isn't the same; for one, it doesn't take nearly as long to make a C...more

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Maya rated it:

06/03/08

bookshelves: memoir-2008

Read in June, 2008

I came to this book with no expectations: I hadn't read any reviews, I just knew that a) lots of people were reading it, seemed to like it, and b) I love mix tapes. So why not?

I was unprepared for the idea that this book would deconstruct Sheffield's experience with marriage and with grieving the loss of his wife; I thought it would be more of a glossy retrospective of old girlfriends, plural. It's a quick read, but touching; better than expected.

I also didn't know anything about Rob S...more

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Brian rated it:

11/14/07

Read in April, 2007

This is just a heart-wrenching book. It's a book a little bit about pop culture, a little bit more about music, and a lot about, as the title says, love and loss. I'm not giving anything away by saying that the author's wife dies at a young age, and suddenly (this information is on the cover and in the first couple of pages). He goes on to describe their relationship with mix tapes leading off each chapter. The only problem I had with the book was that occasionally, those mix tapes didn't really...more

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Shanna rated it:

06/20/07

bookshelves: biosmemoirs, music

Read in June, 2007

recommends it for: music dorks, mixtape lovers, young widows

One of my friends told me to read it and said I would enjoy it.
I liked parts of it a lot: the discussion of the nature of mix tapes v. other mediums and the way that music can define relationships, the fun new songs I found for the first time/remembered, and the really poignant description of his wife's death. This was in some ways more unsettling for me than The Year of Magical Thinking, mainly because they were both so young. They didn't get a chance to live their lives together. It w...more

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Wendy rated it:

12/26/07

Read in December, 2007

It's definitely sweet and heartfelt without being smarmy. It might not qualify as a heavyweight in the canon of literature about grieving but it certainly seemed relatable and it might be a heavyweight in the literature about mixtapes.

I guess, aside from the good parts, of which there were many, including:
-as good defenses of bad pop music as I have ever heard (including Karen you should note! a rousing promotion of Mmmmm Bop)
-a serious promotion of cultivating a love of music from many...more