Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (edit title)

Tim W edited the books like this book of Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time Wednesday, September 16 2009.

• Added High Fidelity: A Novel

Tim W edited the quotations of Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time Wednesday, September 16 2009.

• Added a quotation: “Renée and I met at a bar called the Eastern Standard in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just moved there to study English in grad school. Renée was a fiction writer in the MFA program. I was sitting with my poet friend Chris in a table in the back, when I fell under the spell of Renée’s bourbon-baked voice. The bartender put on Big Star’s Radio City. Renée was the only other person in the room who perked up. We started talking about how much we loved Big Star. It turned out we had the same favorite Big Star song – the acoustic ballad Thirteen. She’d never heard their third album, Sister Lovers. So naturally, I told her the same thing I’d told every other woman I’d ever fallen for: “I’ll make you a tape!””

Tim W edited the summary of Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time Wednesday, September 16 2009.

• Boy meets girl. Boy marries girl. Boy and girl live happily until girl dies of pulmonary embolism. Boy spirals into depression before loving again etc etc.

Tim W edited the ridiculously simplified synopsis of Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time Wednesday, September 16 2009.

• Added: Boy meets girl. Boy marries girl. Boy and girl live happily until girl dies of pulmonary embolism.

Shelfari edited the description of Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time Saturday, August 1 2009.

• 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.

Shelfari edited the contributors of Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time Wednesday, July 22 2009.

• Added a contributor: Rob Sheffield: (Primary Author)