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

veronica ✿

Rating: really liked it
Not me wanting to read this just because Harry Styles did 💀💀💀

Kim

Rating: really liked it
This review’s content may be confusing, annoying, trite or downright laughable to persons not born between 1965 and 1978. Hell, it may be all of that and more to just about anyone. Consider yourself warned.

Put your thinking caps on ‘cuz I’ve got some trippin’ down memory lane for you:
Where were you when you first heard ‘A Day in the Life’? What about ‘Wild World’? What did you think when you finally understood the meaning of ‘She Bop’? What does ‘My Heart Will Go On’ mean to you? Do you know where you were when you heard that Kurt Cobain was dead? What about that guy from Alice in Chains who wasn’t found for like days, rotting away in his apartment, do you remember that? What was the song that was playing the first time you slow danced? Does ‘Darling Nikki’ make you blush? What’s the most important song that you’ve ever put on a mix tape?

Okay, enough. You get it. It’s just overkill now. Confession time: I was a groupie. I was. Really. Duran Duran was my group of choice. Those bastard fans in Wham! and Culture Club were pussies compared to us Duranies. We knew how to obsess. There is still a bond among us. Whenever I meet a woman born around 1970, I know that I can slip in a ’Save a Prayer’ reference and our eyes will meet and there will be that conspiratorial nod... We know that we both cried when we saw the ‘Feed the World’ video and that they were robbed (ROBBED!) of air time. Damn Bono.
It wasn’t until I met my future husband that I actually LISTENED to Duran Duran. Those bass lines are awesome! I knew I loved John Taylor for more than his bangs and impeccable fashion sense! I never knew that certain instruments made certain sounds. I was just used to the end product. I’ve been told I’m a sucker for a good ‘bridge’, whatever that means. Maurice was also the first male friend that actually liked Duran Duran and didn’t mock me for my past transgressions. Boys can be so dumb. Don’t you know that we’ll like you more if you admit that you’ve sung along to Rio? Maurice actually brought me to my first Duran Duran show. We sat on the grassy lawn at Great Woods in Mansfield, Mass and rocked to Ordinary World and danced to The Reflex. I was so proud of him. How many boyfriends will do that?

Okay. So, you see where I‘m going with this, right? I mean it’s so obviously clear.
I may have been a groupie, but Maurice was a full out audiophile. To the point of annoyance.. We’d be out walking and he’d hear something from an open window somewhere and say ‘Oh! Zeppelin 4! Awesome! Did you know that Rolling Stone rated it only 66 out of the top 500 albums! What assholes!’ and then a rant would ensue and that would turn into some sort of ‘ultimate band’ fantasy. And so on. He would wake me up in the middle of the night to ask me what I thought about Geddy Lee’s vocals on ‘Caress of Steel’ versus ‘Fly by Night’. He wasn’t embarrassed to go total Wayne’s World when Bohemian Rhapsody came on while we were driving. My favorite was when we would play ‘who should have been on the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane?’

On our first date, Maurice ended it, not with a kiss, but a ‘I’m going to make you a mix tape!’ I was amused. I was concerned. I was somewhat petrified. This guy was a prog rock fan. Hadn’t I spent most of my adolescence mocking Rush and Yes? Is this karma taking a bit ol’ dump on me? He mailed me the tape. I was living in Boston at the time, he was in the boondocks of NH. I held it. I read the songs. I put it on my desk. I went out for ice cream. Around day 3, I finally had the room to myself (living in a boarding house with 40 other woman, that was a feat) and carefully placed it in my boom box. The first song was ‘Sweetness’ by Yes. ’Honey Pie’ by The Beatles, ’She’s a Rainbow’ The Rolling Stones, ’Come up and See Me (Make me smile)’ by Duran Duran, ‘It’s a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl' by Faust, The Musical Box by Genesis:

She's a lady, she's got time,
Brush back your hair, and let me get to know your face.
She's a lady, she is mine.
Brush back your hair, and let me get to know your flesh.

Not. Very. Subtle.

Anyway, this book. This could be Maurice and me. I know that some people dismiss Rob Sheffield and I don’t know enough about him to say that that’s okay. Maurice would probably know… he knew all the rock critics. But, this story… these mix tapes. They spoke to me in a completely sappy selfish way. I see a lot of Maurice in Rob. Another confession: I don’t read the blurbs about books before I start them. If I like the title or the cover or someone said ’You should read this’, I will go with that. I had no idea that this was a sad love story. (Yeah, I know… the title is ‘Love is a Mix Tape: Life and loss, one song at a time’ --I didn’t really catch the loss part. There’s Rob. Then there’s Rob and Renee and then there’s RobinRenee and then there’s just Rob again. There’s a part where he’s talking about just being Rob again: “I now get scared of forgetting anything about Renee, even the tiniest detail, even the bands on this tape I can’t stand--if she touched them, I want to hear her fingerprints.“

I wonder if Maurice ever thought things like “I suddenly realized how much being a husband was about fear: fear of not being able to keep somebody safe, of not being able to protect somebody from all the bad stuff you want to protect them from. Knowing they have more tears in them than you will be able to keep them from crying.” I know that I did.

Rob relates almost everything through music. He reminds me a lot of Rob Fleming from Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. The guy that always has headphones on, that totally judges you by your cd collection, that has a song for everything. Maurice was always gently forcing me to like his music. I’m a whiny guitar alternadude type of gal. Play me some REM or Blind Melon or Polyphonic Spree. I would get in the car and find a cd in the player and suddenly I’m listening to Argent’s ‘Hold your Head Up’ or ‘Karn Evil 9 1st Impression Pt, 1 & 2’ by ELP. This went on for TWENTY years…. He never tired of it. I have milk crates full of Maurice creations. I can identify with these people. I would strike back with some of my own and we would argue during long car rides what was neutral ground. ELP was out. Genesis was neutral. Poi Dog Pondering was out. INXS was neutral and so on…
I guess that what I’m trying to say is that this book might not be for every one. The minute gestures and pop culture commentary might annoy people. They may not laugh where I laughed or cried when I cried. That’s okay. There are other books. I’m just glad that I had the opportunity to read this one. I feel less alone and that’s a biggie for me.

“They always end with our favorite song “Killer Parties” and sometimes I think, man, all the people I get to hear this song with, we’re going to miss each other when we die. When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.”

I can’t think of a truer sentiment. Maurice is the Smashing Pumpkins ‘1979’ when I’m driving on a warm spring night with the windows down. He’s Nanci Griffith’s ‘Late Night Grande Hotel’ when I’m having a good cry in the tub. He’s Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name Of’ when I’m annoyed with hipsters. It sounds corny, but he gave me this gift and I’m so proud of him and so thankful.
I miss you, Maurice.

Donna

Rating: really liked it
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.

5 stars. And many, many more.

Ron

Rating: really liked it
They met when they were both twenty-three. Rob told Renee, “I’ll make you a mix tape!”, the same thing he’d told every girl he had a crush on. Except this time, it worked and Rob fell hard. Later, they planned to step on a cassette tape at their wedding ceremony, instead of a glass. Between them, they had a love for music, bound by a love for one another. Or maybe it was the other way around.

”Renee was a real cool hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock chick. But, the first record she record she ever owned was KC & the Sunshine Band’s “Get Down Tonight”. KC was her first love. I was her last.”

Even though I knew Rob would lose Renee, my heart was broken by page five. Just read that final line in the quote above. Renee was a country girl. Rob was from the city. ”We had nothing in common, except we both loved music.” Each chapter in this book begins with the name of a mix tape, and its song list. I remember making mix tapes for my high-school girlfriend (followed immediately by a copy for myself – because damn I just put some fine music on there). Making mix tapes is an expression. They say, "Here’s what I like". Party tapes. Sad tapes. Road tapes. Music for the occasion. Reading this book was like reading a ballad to the music of the 70’s, 80’s & 90’s, and all the music worthy of being put on a tape together. It’s also a love song to this girl who entered Rob’s life, and then his heart, and will always remain there.

”She liked passion. She liked adventure. I cowered from passion and talked myself out of adventure. Before I met her, I was just another hermit wolfboy, scared of life, hiding in my room with my records and my fanzines. Suddenly, I got all tangled up in this girl’s noisy, juicy, sparkly life.”

At times this memoir gets off-track from the relationship. I wanted it to stay with Renee. But it’s wholly sentimental, and that’s the way I like ‘em. Plus, it reminds me of those people that come along and change our lives, no matter how short our time with them. At one point I thought of those songs that evoke past memories. The ones when we were young, or young-at-heart, singing at the top of our lungs in the car with the windows rolled down.


PS. The following song wasn’t included in the play list. It’s too recent for that. But I got hung up on playing it while finishing Love is a Mix Tape, and the words sort of resonate. Take It All Back

Heather

Rating: really liked it
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.

Steph

Rating: really liked it

It's not human to let go of love, even when it's dead.

▴▴▴

okay so. i love the format of this book. each chapter begins with a mixtape from some point in (fancy famous music writer) rob sheffield's life. i had such fun reading this and following along with a spotify playlist of all the mixtapes. so many hidden gems that i'd never stumbled upon!!

and i was also drawn to the book's subject matter. sheffield's wife, renée, died unexpectedly in her 20s. much of the memoir is about the loss, his grief, and his efforts to remember her brief and beautiful life. he does a magnificent job of bringing her spirit to the page, and i feel like i know renée after reading his affectionate descriptions of her.

i feel for sheffield's story, but god, he's... kind of a pretentious prick. his snarky, arrogant attitude rubs me the wrong way. he also talks about girls in a way that makes me vaguely uncomfortable. i still empathize with him, and he is a skilled writer who knows a lot about music. but i do not care for the guy, and that makes it really hard to enjoy his work 😩

despite that, it's still valuable as an ode to the mixtape. it made me think a lot about how our mediums for sharing music change so quickly, but some obsolete formats (like mixtapes and mix CDs) retain so much charm. and there are some thoughtful nuggets of wisdom that i really enjoyed.

especially this meditation on grief:

The way I pictured it, all this grief would be like a winter night when you're standing outside. You'll warm up once you get used to the cold. Except after you've been out there a while, you feel the warmth draining out of you and you realize the opposite is happening; you're getting colder and colder, as the body heat you brought outside with you seeps out of your skin. Instead of getting used to it, you get weaker the longer you endure it. I was trying so hard to be strong.

Diane

Rating: really liked it
I fell head-over-heels in love with this book, just as Rob Sheffield fell hard and fast when he met Renee. The book is their love story, but it's also a love story about music. Each chapter opens with the song list from a mix tape Rob either made or received. It was fun to skim the titles, looking for tracks I had used in my own mix tapes.

One of my favorite chapters was when Rob got picked to play the music at his junior high dance. He screwed up big time. He filled his tape with power anthems, which the boys loved, but the girls hated them and wouldn't dance. He said he still had a lot to learn about women.

Both Rob and Renee were radio DJs and music writers, and he admits the only thing they had in common was music. Rob even wooed Renee by making her a mix tape, which is included in one of the chapters.

I expected this book to be sad because Rob warns us early that his wife died of a pulmonary embolism after only five years of marriage, but the book is very funny and sweet, with only one chapter that was a real tearjerker.

By the end, I wished I could have met Renee, who sounds like a firecracker of a Southern gal. But at least I got to hear about her favorite music, which is as close to meeting someone as you can get.

Update Aug. 2013: Sheffield has a new book out about his life after his wife died, and it reminded me how much I had loved this memoir. I was glad I gave it five stars when I first read it because I remember it so fondly that I would have been forced to increase it if it wasn't already there. I highly recommend it to anyone who loves music, memoirs or love stories.

JSou

Rating: really liked it
I didn't really know what this book was about until I started flipping through it last night. I bought it as a last minute, bargain priced add-on from Barnes & Noble, pretty much just to bump up my total to $25 so I could get free shipping. The title caught my eye since making mixtapes took up a lot of time during my teenage years. Seriously, when the iPod was first introduced, I thought it was the greatest invention since the automobile.

Anyway, I was expecting this to be a humorous, dick-lit type novel, having no idea that Sheffield wrote this memoir after his wife of only 5 years passed away. I read the first page, just to get a feel for it, and didn't put it down until I finished. It was a very quick read, but I loved it. There were parts that I had stinging eyes and a lump in my throat, but was laughing out loud at the same time. The references to nineties music, even the whole nineties era were hilarious, and the chapter on Nirvana was some of the best writing on Kurt Cobain's life and death that I've ever read.

I love how Sheffield pointed out how strong an effect music can have on us, especially when dealing with losing someone you love. There's the times when even a favorite song is ruined because hearing it is just too painful...it just makes the situation too real. Other times, it's hearing a new song that you know that person would totally flip for, but knowing they'll never be able to hear it.

I think anyone who loves music, lived through the nineties, or has ever lost someone would really enjoy this. I know it was well worth the whopping $3.99 I paid for it.

Rory

Rating: really liked it
I didn't like this as much as others have seemed to. And what I liked most was probably what others discarded--I liked hearing about the signifcance of all the songs and mixes and bands. But the love story? Sap-tastic and hit-me-over-the-head-repetitive.

Every tenth line of the first long chapter is heavy foreshadowing mixed with hipster melodrama--you know, "That music changed my life. But Renee was my life. And then my life went away." Then something like "Love isn't like a cassingle. It's like a mixed CD. And my and Renee's hearts were mixed with an A and a B side. And then she broke." Or WHATEVER.

A lot of cutesy little details are repeated throughout the book, too, and I wondered if the book had originally been published as a series of columns (it wasn't, as far as I can tell).

Finally, just to be a real grouch, the author seems to have a type--he describes all his girlfriends and his beloved (dead? did you hear?) wife the same: from the South, pie-baking, punk-riot, energetic, dyed-red hair, music-loving, extrovert. So I never quite got why Renee stuck out so much.

RandomAnthony

Rating: really liked it
How come, when most authors write about music, they write as if they're trying to sound like scholars of the Pitchfork generation? And how did Rob Sheffield know he should skip all that and write a great book about the intersection of music, tragedy, and everyday existence?

Love is a Mix Tape is Mr. Sheffield's account of his marriage, wife's death, and the role music played in their lives. The couple were one of those with a musical cute meet (Big Star related, even) and a shared Pavement fanaticism. This book could have gone downhill so quickly. But Mr. Sheffield manages to walk the line between false humility and rock critic verbiage because he sounds, well, like he's talking in a normal voice, very slowly and carefully, about his history. He seems like the kind of person who accessed music to mediate his interactions, so when he gets a girlfriend, gets married, and loses his wife, he contextualizes events and emotions around the music that's playing and the songs passing through his mind. The music and narrative intertwine and emerge raw and heartfelt (and I don't like the word “heartfelt” but the word fits). I hope Mr. Sheffield felt better after he wrote this book because he takes serious, honest risks when, for example, he considers whether or not he should use the word “widow” or when he describes how he reads at Applebee's because he knows he won't run into any friends at mall restaurants.

Sheffield writes like Chuck Klosterman's shy friend at the bar, the one who interjects a comment here and there but doesn't need to dominate the conversation. I'm not surprised Klosterman praises this book on the back jacket; fans of one author most likely are/would be fans of the other. My only problem with Love is a Mix Tape surfaced near the text's end; Sheffield wraps up the narrative too quickly, in my eyes, out of nowhere. But I have new respect for Mr. Sheffield, who I only knew previously from VH-1 list shows (e.g. “40 Top One Hit Wonders”). Sheffield gets the fan's quieter, more personal relationship with music, the kind that gathers most of its power when no one is around, or when only one other person is around and the experience is shared as a manifestation of trust and love. Love is a Mix Tape captures this state in surprising, meaningful ways.

Jenny (Reading Envy)

Rating: really liked it
Rob Sheffield only had a few years with his wife before she died suddenly, and this book is about their relationship and his own background, all through mix tapes. It is a clever framing but also full of meaning, because all of us are probably most connected to the music from our teen through college years.

Some of the music was unknown to me, but a lot of it was deeply familiar - I immediately went looking to see if someone had already pulled it together in Spotify, and they had!

Another thing I loved about the book is how it reminds me of High Fidelity, a book/movie I happen to love, and the main character is also named Rob. Impossible not to think of it while reading this.

Love... loss... music, this has everything that matters about life.

mina

Rating: really liked it
I love how music was such a big part of Rob’s life; it feels like music had a greater meaning back then. Music nowadays is still important—I can’t imagine my day without music, the thought itself is depressing—but I don’t get the same vibe as when I read this memoir, it’s like people instead of air breathed music which is awesome.

After this I want to receive mixed tapes.

Sally

Rating: really liked it
mixed feelings much to think about

Eilonwy

Rating: really liked it
3-1/2 stars

In 1991, when they were both 23, Rob Sheffield fell in love with a woman named Renée. Five years later, she died, of a pulmonary embolism ("just bad luck," the coroner tells Rob). In between, they married, wrote for music magazines, hung out in record stores (remember those?), and went to a lot of live shows featuring whoever made it to Charlottesville, Virginia. And they made mix tapes. Lots and lots of them. For washing the dishes, walking the dog, driving, sewing, getting up in the morning, going to sleep at night. You name it, they came up with a mix of songs for it.

Each chapter of this book starts with a tape and its contents, as Rob reminisces about their relationship with each other and with the music. It's bittersweet and poignant, of course, but mostly enjoyable and eminently readable thanks to Rob's natural charm.

This book felt to me like a US-oriented essay version of the Phonogram graphic novels, in the way it captures both a musical scene of the moment, and relationships between people that now feel tied to that moment forever, with both the scene and the people gone. Rather than the Britpop that makes up Phonogram's soundtrack, Rob and Renée's life together is all grunge and guitar bands, leavened with a lot of Pavement.

The most moving essays for me were one about Kurt Cobain, where Rob describes how he hears Nirvana's MTV Unplugged performance as the wrenching cry of a young husband desperate to protect his wife and baby and clueless about how to do it (as Rob also feels), and one about the burst of female-fronted bands in the 90's, as Rob's passion for feminism really shines.

The part of the book right after Renée dies is tough to read, especially if you've been through a sudden, unexpected death. Rob's numbness, disbelief, and paralysis are all too familiar, as is his eventual acceptance that life just keeps going on, even when you think it shouldn't, and don't really want it to. I loved his thoughts about how there are songs you can just never listen to again, period ... but also songs you think you'll never be able to bear again, but which get reintroduced and reclaimed, because life is sneaky and unpredictable that way.

This is a melancholy, yet at the same time celebratory, time-capsule of a book.

Emilia P

Rating: really liked it
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 book is about how he loves her and music.

1a)He describes her as this sort of girl that's bouncy and
adventurous and strong, the kind of girl that I basically
assume all boys love, and the great thing is, she's a
real person.

2) He is an Irish Catholic. This means he talks about being Irish, likes to wash the dishes, and also it means that he thanks the BVM in his acknowledgments. Thats the Blessed Virgin Mary for those of you not in the know. TIGHT.

3) He has excellent musical taste, by which I mean, really devotedly eclectic. He talks about loving crap pop, and Pavement, and old country music on the radio. Plus, he is talking about a great time in music and mixtapes. At the end of the book, he reflects on how awesome music was during the 90s, because they actually let the indie ppl out to play for a little while. And it's true. Plus some of his mixtape selections made me grin. They include "Don't Worry Baby", "I Can't Make You Love Me", Prince, Liz Phair, Sleater-Kinney's " Little Babies", "Famous Blue Raincoat", and just generally a lot of stuff that reminds me of listening to the radio at about age 14 , which, all told, wasn't such a bad age.

It may not be your cup of tea, but it sure was mine. Mixtapes forevs.