LOVE IS A MIX TAPE

LOVE IS A MIX TAPE

By Rob Sheffield

This is one of the most touching books I’ve ever read. It’s sweet without being sappy, cute without being cutesy, painful without being unbearable. It’s about music and how it can weave through our lives and sew us together, even when we think we’re unraveling.

“When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.”

I’ve had that quote on my wall for a couple of years, framed with several photos of musicians I love and have the good fortune to know or to have met. What I didn’t know is that the quote is Rob Sheffield’s and is from this book. What a delight to come across it, and just one more reason to love this story.

Rob Sheffield is a music journalist and contributor to Rolling Stone magazine. In Love Is a Mix Tape, he plays his life for us, song by song, and shares the mix tapes that led him through a music-obsessed and passionate life with his wife, Renee. If you are of an age to remember the magic of mix tapes in your youth and in your love life, you’ll totally understand this book. Although the musical focus is primarily that of 90’s music, Rob also highlights the couple’s love of many genres and many other decades of songs and how they impacted their lives.

“Sometimes great tunes happen to bad times, and when the bad time is over, not all the tunes get to move on with you.”

“Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of life.”

Through his mix tapes, Rob leads us not only through his life with Renee, but through his devastation at her death, and how music stayed always and forever a part of it all. He takes us through the music he can still no longer bear to listen to because it was theirs together, to the new artists and songs that Renee never got a chance to know, to the songs that helped him understand what to hold on to and what to let go of.

As a music addict, I related so much to this story, through a basic, gut-knowledge that Rob’s story is the story of so many music lovers’ lives, not necessarily because of the death of a spouse, not necessarily because everyone lived through the 90’s and listened to mix tapes, but because music gets it. It gets us. It knows everything we go through and there’s always a song for it. Because our lives are basically a mix tape of everything we think and live and love and do.

Reviewed September 2017