Feel the Burn//the joy of the mix tape/CD
- May 25
- 6 min read
I was perusing my internet gal pal Payge's glorious website www.witchmuse.com and came upon a section where she invited us all to share the good news: did you hear we're burning mix CDs again?! Admittedly the first time I saw it I though- awww. That is so ultra cool and nostalgic, but I don't even have a CD drive in my current computer and don't foresee splurging on the necessary materials to do this. But as I was peeping on Payge's TikTok and I saw her creating the artwork for her very own Mix CD, I forced my ADHD brain to inhale (deep breath in...and...exhale...see, you forgot to do the oxygen thing too, didn't you? You're in the right place, sis <3), and think for a second: why don't I just google how to burn a CD? I had just retrieved a bunch of me and my sister's CD collection of yore and have a little travel player hooked up to some external speakers and have now been collecting soundtracks off of ebay in some sweet buy 2 get one free deals- and I even found a spindle of BLANKS! Turns out, I really did have the goods. A cheap external DVD player that I didn't realize was totally capable of burning, and ye olde iTunes!
I'm an iTunes girlie. Well, I was. I still have my ipod though I haven't plugged it into a computer for about a decade. All my music was once stored on the family computer and back in those days it all co-mingled: the tracks purchased from the itunes store, uploaded CDs, mp3s sent from a friend...everything. Then one day, out of the clear blue sky- my library was decimated. Even the songs from CDs that I had bought with my own damn allowance (that would be the entire Beatles catalogue, fam) were GONE! The Who, Led Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane, demos from my friends' bands, soundtracks, episodes of BBA Radio. I lost almost everything overnight. You would think I would have made the switch to Spotify immediately but alas had gotten so used to Apple products and that was my world for so long I just couldn't do it. So I started using my iPhone in place of my old iPod and kept the little mini untouched. To this day it houses songs that are not available anywhere online and exist on forgotten CDs and old computer files. I've had many crashouts over what APPLE MUSIC did to my library. I haven't really forgiven them. So imagine how awkward I feel confessing that I had to go back to them to do the thing and burn my first mix CD.
Ok. So. Blank CDs? Check. Empty CD Cases? Found a few. Playlists? Constructed! All I needed to do was buy the tracks from itunes, which I deadass didn't know still existed via Apple Music, but walk with me- we're re-learning a lot on this little journey. Do I use spotify these days? Yes I do, albeit reluctantly. I don't love how little they pay artists per stream, but in this day and age it's all about the social media component and the amount of listeners you pull on there is worth it's weight in gold so until i fully pull away from streaming; a legitimate though lofty goal of mine, I'm using it for my playlists and such. I thought maybe if I subscribed to Apple Music I'd get unlimited downloads that I could burn but that was an absolutely not from our corporate overlords, and so I did something I haven't done in a very long time- I put together Payge's playlist into my iTunes and ponied up the 99 cents per track I needed to pay to burn the songs onto my shiny compact disks. I'm sure there are ways to do this for free but fam I didn't have it in me. Her mix had a couple songs that were not for sale on Apple music and for those I screen recorded them from youtube, converted the videos into audio files on my phone and then sent them to my laptop and while harrowing, I did get a twinge of the pirate life if you know what I mean. So the list was complete and now it was time for the moment of truth: BURN, BABY, BURN.
I had no idea what a rush this was going to be. Watching the tracks one by one being laser etched (right? Is that the process? Whatever. It sounded cool) onto this holographic chunk of plastic just for me was thrilling. This is peak millenial cornball behavior, right? But it's true! I had never burned a MIX CD before. I had burned full albums a couple times but it wasn't something I had gotten particularly used to. By the time I had a sizable CD collection, lugging around those big books of them was not very practical. But now with a new appreciation for physical media, I am quite happy to participate in this mixtape culture. Because once I was finished burning Payge's CD called Girls in Their Bedrooms I was already onto burning a companion CD. One I had mixed myself. I created the playlist on Spotify first, checked to make sure it topped in at 80 min which is how much space is on my blanks, and even designed my own artwork just like on Witch Muse. Although I didn't really intend on making my mix a companion CD to Girls in their Bedrooms, when it came time to coming up with a title and designing the graphics...it just sort of turned out that way. Now, with both disks all decorated and ready to play, I felt like I had just communicated with my internet sistah from California. In a more profound way than exchanging DMs on Instagram, and even more personal than writing a letter- this was different.
I had put something together that she made for US, and was inspired to reciprocate. Mix Tapes used to be something that kids would do to bond and it makes sense. It's exciting, it's free, and nothing tells someone you care for more about you than the music you're really into right now. My mix is called Golden Hour for the Girls and although it's for everyone at any time of day, it's full of tracks that were meant for staring out the window alone in your room with your headphones on, while the sun says goodbye and you feel a clarity of thought that doesn't seem to come around in other moments. I pulled tracks from some of my favorite movies and shows, and just a lot of female forward goodies. It's like the soundtrack to your life, and yes ma'am you ARE the main character. Get into it! I'm sure I'll need a volume two very soon but for now here is Volume 1:
If you'd like to burn this one for yourself and need the artwork, I have it all right here, just click to expand to full size:
Anyway, that's the story of how I burned my first Mix CD. I've always been a bit late to the party in a lot of ways but sometimes things happen the way they do for a reason. If you need a dopamine hit I highly recommend this. You can even decorate the CD with just paper and some markers, pens, stickers, whatever ya got. And please participate! If you have an 80 min mix of perfection, drop me a line and we can make a collection. I have to give Miss Payge one more shout-out of gratitude for inspiring me to take the plunge. I now feel like I'm a part of something bigger than myself, which honestly is how this ol' internet used to be. In this age of AI slop and social media clout-farming; the desperation to go "viral" while the world burns, we just want to let you in. Into our little worlds. Our diaries. Our bedrooms, where we make so so much of our most groundbreaking creations. This is such a fabulous vehicle to do so- like The Ship of the Imagination if it were piloted by a glitter-obsessed audiophile armed with an arsenal of Sandy Lion stickers and fueled by tea, toast and her one cigarette a night.
I love how this turned into a companion CD unintentionally. It really is kind of like writing letters back and forth but through art and music. Cheers to inviting each other into our bedrooms! Off to burn yours!