In fall 2004 I left a job in Washington, D.C., for grad school in Iowa. It was a fourteen-hour drive, and I needed music for the car. This was before streaming services turned all our phones into on-demand jukeboxes. Though I’ve always enjoyed making mixes. There’s a meditative quality to it, assembling a sequence of songs that can capture a mood, or document a season of your life.
Those two years in Iowa were strange. In workshop, it felt like all my classmates had arrived with a sophisticated, fully-formed vocabulary of criticism. At parties, too, they’d name-check authors and critics, or even specific long-form essays from The New Yorker or Harper’s, in a way that made me wonder if I’d missed an email about a summer reading list.
I spent a lot of time in the library, trying to catch up. I also spent a lot of time in my car, tooling around the Iowa countryside, which was both hillier and more beautiful than I expected. On those drives I listened to mixes I made on my laptop, ripping songs from CDs I owned and looking for others on music blogs or LimeWire. I gave them vaguely pretentious titles that seemed to fit with my newly literary life: Postcards from Middle America; Songs for a Winter Afternoon.
During those Iowa years, I don’t think I enjoyed writing very much. It was something I’d been told I was good at, and I was the kind of perpetual Gifted & Talented kid who needed the dopamine hit of being told I was good at things. I took pleasure in finding the right line of dialogue, or the kind of description my classmates might mark with a little penciled check of approval. But I didn’t have any sense of a larger project. The stories I was writing, who were they for? Why did they need to exist?
As a kid I made mixtapes—actual tapes—when I was sad or pensive or, to use the current vernacular, “up in my feelings.” When my dad’s Navy career forced us to move again. When a girl I had a secret crush on showed up to school holding hands with another boy. Eventually I actually gave a few mixes to girls, and even got a few in return. Though the first mixtapes I received were from a family friend who, for several years, was a kind of surrogate big brother. He introduced me to Talking Heads, Crowded House, Elvis Costello. I remember that he took great care with the handwritten track listings, and that he had a signature doodle he’d include on the spine, like his own record label.
In workshop, Frank Conroy said, “Sometimes writing is like this,” and he laid his hand on the table, palm down, then gritted his teeth while he mimed pushing against some great resistance. This made me think I was on the right track, because writing a story felt like a Sisyphean task, one I probably would have given up on if not for the workshop deadlines. In the evenings, if I got stuck with my writing, I’d often have a couple drinks and work on a mix CD instead, which satisfied some of the same creative impulses but was also a lot more fun.
My junior-year prom date gave me a pretty great mixtape. It included a few cheesy soft-rock songs we secretly loved, but sandwiched between enough “cool” music to provide the necessary cover. A year later, my first real girlfriend made me a pretty lousy mix—the song selection felt random, with no real progression from track to track, and an annoying amount of dead air at the end of Side One—but I appreciated the gesture. Also, whatever she lacked in musical taste she made up for in other areas, like a willingness to hold my hand in public, and parents with surprisingly few qualms about leaving us alone in their house after school.
Whenever I made a mix, even if it was only for myself, I always pictured a listener progressing through the tracks. Which ones would they know, and which would be new? How far could I push into weird or unfamiliar territory before I risked losing them? You don’t want to pander—a mix of nothing but popular bangers isn’t much of a mix at all—but you also don’t want a listener to feel like they’re yawning through a lecture class.
The stories I was writing in grad school, I didn’t give much thought to who might read them, or why. Our workshops tended to focus on the technical—pacing and scene-building and all that—so it was easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. At the same time, Iowa seemed like such a lofty literary place that it encouraged us to think about posterity. In a sense, I was writing simultaneously for no one and everyone. Probably this is why my mix CDs from that era were so much better than my stories.
I still make mixes, though mostly on Spotify, a different animal. Freed from the constraints of physical media, and on a platform that defaults to shuffle, you have to come up with different kinds of creative constraints. Several years ago, after a bike I’d ridden around Philly for a decade finally gave up the ghost, I threw a party and made a playlist that included songs about bicycles and songs about death. During the pandemic I made a playlist called School Carpool & Soccer Practice, made up entirely of songs I would’ve heard while my mother drove me around during elementary school (my dad listened exclusively to oldies radio, so his mix would’ve been different).
These days, when I sit down to write an essay, or to work on the novel that’s gradually nearing completion, I’m picturing a smaller, more concrete audience of readers. That makes it easier to contemplate the things they might enjoy, or laugh at, or grow bored with. Occasionally I’ve written something that traveled to a wider audience than I expected, which is a nice surprise. But like those grad-school mixes, the real pleasure now is the writing itself: putting into language some feeling or mood; creating a document of what it feels like inside a given season of my life.
In writing this post, it occurred to me I currently have no device on which to play any of these old mixes. But I turned one into a Spotify playlist, which you can listen to if you want: