Mixtapes are really flattering self-portraits, but the best ones are selfies of two.
Summer Anne Burton
I have always given my crushes pet names: a never-revealed infatuation with my friend "Married," the waiter "Seconds," a future boyfriend "Twelvest," and someone who I would eventually come to refer to as "Purgatory" to his face.
I named "Wilco and Breakfast" that because of how I imagined our future together — listening to Summerteeth on vinyl while smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee in bed. "His beard makes me feel like he'd make good pancakes," I told my roommate during one of our countless conversations about the boys I was considering hitching my crush wagon to.
Wilco and Breakfast was a co-worker, but in a different department so it was a mysterious and slow-moving courtship. He maintained a soft reserve throughout his tenure. He was always kind, but never really hung around to get to know his colleagues. He had a round face, ruddy cheeks, broad shoulders, and that beard, which probably accounted for at least 60% of my reasons for crushing. He was several years older than me and a musician. A musician with a rumbly Southern drawl who would sing his songs about girls in the corner of some Tex-Mex restaurant once a week.
I didn't stand a chance.
I'd wait for him to clock out for his cigarette break and then go out for mine. I'd sit next to him, pretending it was a coincidence, and we'd chat about the easy stuff: books, movies, songs. We shared a weakness for sad stories and vintage anythings. At some point, I loaned him a copy of one of my favorite films — David Gordon Green's All The Real Girls, and he wrote me a short email the next day saying "I loved it. I loved it two times." I found those two sentences so charming that I showed the email to half of my co-workers.
At some point I became confident that my feelings were, at least in some part, mutual. Wilco and Breakfast had a thing for vintage pinup girls — I knew this because of MySpace — and he would compliment my knee high socks or my slouchy trench coat in this certain way that felt like a wink. He would occasionally use the word beautiful — as in "you look beautiful today," or "that dress is beautiful," which knocked me over because boys my age never called anything beautiful, especially girls that they barely knew. It was all very fun and exciting and sweet, as requited crushes tend to be.
My next move was obvious: I made him a mix.
Summer Anne Burton
Someone told me once that mixtapes are barely about music at all. They are about which songs you hope will be forever linked to your face and subconsciously understood as your intentions. Mixtape making is flattering self-portraiture — like choosing the perfect selfie to express how funny, sexy, light-hearted, or endearing you are...preferably all of the above.
I have been working at this art since I was 16, crafting hundreds of meticulously chosen mixtapes, CDs, and playlists for best friends, foxy boys, friendly co-workers, and various bad decisions. I've learned to embrace the vanity of mix-making while also making mixes that people really want to listen to. I've been doing this so much — more than any other creative pursuit — and for so long, that I've started to think that mixtapes have become my purest self-expression.
The only way I know how to feel something is to make a mix about it.
These days, finding someone who actually listens to cassettes is a white whale, so I have switched to Spotify and gift-wrapped CDs. It's fun, but not quite the same. Making someone a cassette was so personal because of the time you had to spend with the songs, sitting in front of a cassette player pushing buttons and obsessing over whether the song you wanted would fit on what was left of a side. It was different for the listener too — cassettes don't make it easy to skip tracks, so they're forced sit and listen to what you have to say.
