Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

I grew up on mix tapes. First recording songs off the radio, then sometimes recording songs from my father’s great record collection, and then from tape to tape when we got fancy with our boomboxes. I loved mix tapes. Each song took you on a journey and each transition somehow told you something, intimately, about the other person. When dating in the 90s and early 2000s the mixtape, which became the mix-CD, was a language of courtship steeped in the senses.

For my fifteenth birthday, my very first boyfriend made me a mixtape with a white cover (because yes, you had to make your own cover and write the songs out, a mixtape was work, a labor of love!). The mixtape he made for me was called “Ada, the White Album.” I always loved that. It had a lot of Led Zeppelin on it, R.E.M., and I wish I could find it now. There was also a time when every guy who made me a mixtape put the song, “Superman” by R.E.M. in the mix. I guess they wanted me to think they were superman, supermen?

What I once loved about mixtapes, and what I still love about mixtapes, is that the songs are forever linked to old flames or old friends. Just the other day I heard Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony Eyes” and I texted my friend Jenia to tell her, because that was the first song on one of our mixtapes that we made together the summer when I had the maroon Ford Tempo and had just turned eighteen.

I still remember spending that one summer in Sonoma, California, in between coming home from Europe and starting college, and I constantly played a mixtape my older brother had sent me when I was abroad. Everyone who I drove around, or dropped off after their shifts as waiters and bartenders loved the mix. I was the sober driver because I was younger than everyone and well, the sober one. I think I played that tape so often it melted into the tape deck.

Today’s poem speaks to how songs can link us to people forever and how the ultimate John Cusack movie, High Fidelity, gave us all an excuse to rank not just our favorite songs, but our favorite loves.

High Fidelity
by Tara Betts

Cusack declares what you missed about Chicago,
                  how the places with the best music and art tucked
themselves in dingy, cramped places. That’s not
                  romantic, it’s what it was, and you ate food built
to insulate you from the hawk, air talons that cut 
                  your face, how the el over Damen makes
cameos in the background, how this scene is
                  about love or at least amicably sharing a bed,
then having a beer because it gets cold. Why
                  not talk when your love moves out as you
debate the top five loves of your life, as if
                  a person could ever be the stew of the best
five albums you could hold in one hand or
                  the ten best R&B songs ever recorded. People
play themselves like a tape, over and over, yet
                  there is always one that throws in that one
single we forgot we knew, or never expected.
                  We wait to put the needle to their etched curves,
to rewind in a deck or twist with a pencil so 
                  that song plays, maybe go back and find more.

"High Fidelity" by Tara Betts from REFUSE TO DISAPPEAR copyright © 2022 Tara Betts. Used by permission of The Word Works.