Mixing Musical Narrative
As summer pushes spring’s face in the dirt, friends pile in cars, hop on planes, and move away, revel in respite on coasts and in log cabins, kissing the unexpected slap of humidity as they step into the new sun. Amid the departure of those I’ve spent my year with, I’ve rekindled one of my oldest hobbies – the art of making music mixes to send friends off. What I discovered last week, while rearranging songs on a buddy’s road trip playlist, before burning it to a CD, is how similar today’s mp3 mix-making process is to today’s writing process. Gone are the days when we taped songs off the radio, leaving off the beginning of “Motown Philly,” because we were too young to recognize the beginning, or using the gabby white noise of the DJ as transition from song to song. Gone are the days of writers’ trashcans barfing crumpled wads of spidery ink. Nowadays, we move songs around, find ways to crossfade, smooth the transitions, so we don’t make the mistake of following, say, Neko Case with Three 6 Mafia. Mixes are like stories and essays, in that they have to take the audience somewhere unexpected, but make them feel cool and comfortable at the same time, happy that they took the time to listen, hopefully with plans to re-listen. It’s sad to see the days of making mix tapes go, but the craft has become more conducive to success through drafting and editing. So, at the risk of High Fidelity-ing, I’m going to list some of my personal rules for making 60 – 75 minute mixes, and attempt to liken them, perhaps stretching in a few cases, to the writing process.
- One should never, ever begin a mix with a live song.
The cheers of the audience suggest an air of self-congratulation to the creator, and it’s a cheap method of engaging the listener. Furthermore, when we hear the singer dedicate his/her song before performing it, it’s like hearing someone making excuses before getting workshopped, or opening a piece with a line of dialogue, which really isn’t okay. The writer is the master of his/her prose, and one shouldn’t let the voices of their creations lead things off. It suggests that the author can’t think of strong enough an opening line.
- Speaking of opening lines/songs, the first song of a mix needs to be engaging, but shouldn’t be overbearing.
There’s still an hour of music left – don’t blow your load prematurely and expect your pillow talk to carry the rest of the experience. Opening paragraphs are tricky, of course. Having read Willow Springs submissions for nearly a year now, I’ve found that when the prose kicks down the door with strong voice and alliteration, the subsequent paragraphs are often a jumbled mess, obscuring the narrative. Or, in some cases, the author gets drunk on language. I’ve made the mistake of making mix tapes in the past, the catalyst of which were two or three awesome songs, the rest filler, and I found I would run my batteries dry fast forwarding and rewinding to the good stuff. Today, assuming one has music software, such as iTunes or Windows Media, we don’t have to worry about that – we can make cuts. Cut 17 of the 20 songs and keep looking.
- This is a brand new rule for me, but is perhaps the most important: drafting and redrafting is key to creating a perfect mix.
Sometimes when we think we’ve created the best mix in 20 years, we’ll listen to it and hate it, find that the recording levels contrast too much between the Seeds track from the Sixties and the Clientele track from last year, or that the heart-stabbing Elliot Smith song is too dramatic a closer. (Too soon? I couldn’t help it.) Listen to the mix during a jog or a bike ride, find its problems, cut and replace. The interface is here to help us, and while choosing songs and arranging them is more intuitive than fussing with rerecording cassette tapes and killing the sound quality, editing a mix to perfection has become harder, and the same can be said for the evolution from longhand to laptop. The act of drafting words may be easier for us today, but the skill of the craft is just as essential as it ever was.
- Keep your audience in mind, but don’t pander to them.
So your new boyfriend loves Dave Matthews Band and Pearl Jam? That’s great, I suppose, but he’s probably already got most of their stuff. Put Poi Dog Pondering and Dinosaur Jr on the mix – show them you care about their tastes, but give them something new and better, yet familiar, to take away from the experience.
A old friend of mine once told me that the best mixes are accidental – that you just pile a bunch of songs onto a CD/tape/what-have-you and let the music speak for itself. That’s like saying that one can write a publishable essay by remembering poignant moments from one’s life and writing them down as they happen to come. In other words, it’s bullshit. Some may write better first drafts than others, but there’s no denying that today’s writing process takes place in the edits, and while it is possible to make an outstanding mix in one swoop, the best take time and effort.
What are some of your rules/tricks to making mixes, and how they lend to the overall narrative of the mix?
What a fun post! I haven’t made a mix since the days of tapes, which means decades? And at the start of the post I thought it sounded fun, though now I see there are so many rules I’d surely break. And, I didn’t know it was wrong to start a story with dialogue. I like dialogue as a way to start a piece, though I hear your arguments regarding why you don’t think it is a good practice.
I love “As summer pushes spring’s face in the dirt”! You are on fire, Mr. Edmonds.
Haha – all my points are moot, of course. Amy Hempel begins a few short stories with dialogue, too, so there are always exceptions. I think the no-dialogue-as-opener thing is a rule I heard from an instructor long ago and have since unflinchingly obeyed.