02 November

Mix Tape of My Life!

My wife wrote a blog post with the same title, and posted word of it to facebook.  A lot of her friends commented on it, and it seemed so fun, I thought I'd make a sort of hypothetical, autobiographical playlist of my own.


C'mon Eileen- Dexy's Midnight Runners
This is the first song I remember playing loud on the radio.  That or...


Tainted Love- Soft Cell
I can't tell if I loved this song then so I love it now, or vice versa.  I do remember hearing it back then.  But I certainly love it now.

I Wanna Be A Clone- Steve Taylor
A real favorite when I was a younger teenager.  I went through a period of "purity" (it was really just a hard surface gloss that hid the festering waste inside) and only listened to Christian rock all through high school.  This can represent part of that time, along with...

It's The Eighties (Where's Our Rock Packs?)- Daniel Amos
Still one of my favorites, DA was absolutely formational in my understanding of combining faith and art.

Always Something There To Remind Me- Naked Eyes
I think this is the greatest 80's song there is- even if it was written and recorded in the 60's.  They didn't include the analog synthesizers or the drum machines (here, played by a real drummer hitting electronic drum pads to sound like a drum machine!)

Gloria- U2
Somehow, at the same time that I was "learning" (it's a long long story) to listen to only Christian rock, I saw the Live @ Red Rocks video on a 10 foot tall screen, so U2 somehow escaped my "ban" on secular music.  I bought this on cassette and played it endlessly.

Heaven- Talking Heads
The first album to begin to form a crack in my facade of Christian music was the album Stop Making Sense.  If you haven't seen that film, you really should.  This is just one of many favorites.  This seems a good time to explain that I wasn't clueless during my high school years.  I knew who David Byrne was.  I just chose to not listen to that kind of music until this album.  I subscribed religiously to bike magazines for years that had coverage of bands, and knew generally, sometimes quite specifically, about the Cure, and that sort of new wave bands. 

Begin the Begin- R.E.M.
I discovered them in college as part of my emergence from Christian rock, and there are so many of their songs I love it's hard to choose just one, but when I heard this one, my heart was won over forever.  The lyrics are nonsense, on one level, but somehow I finally felt like someone was speaking for me, not at me.

A Little Respect- Erasure
In 1993, when I lived in Ocean City, NJ, with a leadership community living training kinda thing called OCBP, my cooking group loved this song and played it almost every time we cooked.  This led to my secret love of bleepy technopop music.

The Lust, The Flesh, The Eyes...-77's
We had a band during my seminary years called Engine Seven (it was hard to settle on a name) and we played this song.  Also, one of my lifetime favorites.


I could go on, I suppose, but this was the point in my life where I met my wife, then had my daughter, and around this time, a little before, perhaps, I stopped listening to quite as much music.  This short list gives you a good sampling of the music of my life, though.

Share your own lists in the comments!

2 comments:

  1. You remember the mix tape you made in seminary of all our most meaningful songs? Mine was stolen when those kids broke into my car. I have wished I could remember what was on there.

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  2. Why would ANYONE steal a mix tape? Sorry to hear that. If you could remember everyone that gave a song, perhaps you could recreate it. I for one do not remember which song I put on there.

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