Side A
Everclear-I Will Buy You A New Life
Loreena McKennitt-The Mummer's Dance
Marcy Playground-Sex and Candy
Chris Cornell-Sunshower
Master P featuring Fiend, Silkk The Shocker, Mia X & Mystikal-Make 'Em Say Uhh!
The Wallflowers-5th Avenue Heartache
Third Eye Blind-Semi-Charmed Life
Natalie Imbruglia-Torn
Blink 182-Dammit
Fiona Apple-Criminal
Savage Garden-Truly Madly Deeply
snippet of Oasis' "Don't Go Away"
Side B
Sublime-Wrongway
Nine Inch Nails-Head Like A Hole
Pearl Jam-Given To Fly
Mary J. Blige-A Dream
LSG featuring Missy Elliott-My Body (Remix)
Queen Pen featuring Lost Boyz-Party Ain't A Party
Mono-Life In Mono
The Getaway People-She Gave Me Love
Green Day-Basket Case
OMC-How Bizarre
The Offspring-Self-Esteem
Spacehog-Mungo City
first two verses of Foo Fighters' "My Hero"
One day I had to buy a swimming cap for P.E. class, so I went to the Walgreens near my home. While shopping for the cap, I walked around the store and found other items there that piqued my interest that I had no idea were so easily within reach, things such as magazines, comic books and most importantly, blank cassette tapes. Without much money of my own and barely any knowledge of how and where to shop for myself, I had to rely on my mother for anything that I wanted to purchase. A lot of the times I would either be too embarrassed to ask for something or I didn't want any money spent on me since I felt it could be put to better use. My weekly stipend from my mother (I associate the word "allowance" too much with carefree spending) was $20 every week and was to be used for lunch money and transportation to school. I definitely made sure I had enough to get to and from school on the train, but since I rarely ate lunch—and if I did it was usually chips and pop from the vending machine—I always had enough money to spend on the aforementioned goodies at Walgreens. Eventually, going there was a ritual I did every Monday after school.
From that point on, I no longer relied on using hand-me-down cassettes from other people. As long as my savings allowed, I could purchase 90-minute tapes whenever I pleased. The brand I bought the most was Sony since I believe it was the only kind that Walgreens sold that had 90 minutes. You could also buy three or five in a pack, which was a discount considering how often I recorded stuff from the radio.
Instead of going overboard with the title like I did last time, I just simply titled all my mixtapes from here on out as volumes of The Collection. I felt it was fitting at the time considering how many different genres were covered and that it would be an essential part of my listening habits. What other collection would I need besides The Collection? was my line of thinking.
It was also appropriate that I started calling my mixtapes The Collection since I spent an entire year of listening to the amateurish techniques of my previous efforts to know how to create a more suitable listening experience. An essential collection couldn't be just be all about the selection of songs. Gone now were the random snippets of songs interspersed throughout and a DJ's voice could only be heard for a split second at the most in between songs. If there were going to be any snippets, it usually meant that I had ran out of time for a song at the end of a side.
Although Vol. 2 has a place in my heart because it signaled a new beginning, it wouldn't have meant half as much to me if I didn't enjoy the songs on here. I have to admit that I wasn't the craziest about "6th Avenue Heartahe" and "Semi-Charmed Life," but I've grown to appreciate them more and they still hold up as enjoyable 90s fare. I do have to admit that I still have a soft spot for Savage Garden's "Truly Madly Deeply." The simplicity of the melody is what drew me into it and at the time I identified with how highly romantic it was. It was incredibly earnest, moreso than anything else I can remember on the radio at the time. Sidenote: I did not like "I Want You" during this period.
On the other side of the spectrum, I feel no pangs of shame in talking about how great "Life In Mono" is. I keep trying to picture if something as dreamlike as this could get moderate airplay today, but I just see it as doing really well as far as placements in commercials and movie trailers in 2011.
I'm pretty sure my absolute favorite song around this time was "Mungo City." It was one of those tunes that whenever it came on in my room, I had to stop whatever I was doing and give all my attention to it, which usually meant blasting the volume, singing out loud and jumping around all while imagining what the video would look like. In my head, I pictured the band playing raucously for a huge crowd of garishly uniformed soldiers in a urban setting. They would shout back the chorus at the band onstage because. In my mind the song felt so huge that an army was needed to convey it.
In an earlier post, I briefly mentioned how saddened I was that I didn't have "How Bizarre" in its entirety. I first became familiar with it on the World Chart Show during the previous year, but I probably should have remembered that it did cross over in a big way here in America and that I had an opportunity to capture the whole song. I don't know where I would be without my quirky pop songs.
While nowhere near as quirky, the sound of "The Mummer's Dance" still made it an unusual choice to get play on both Q101 (alternative) and "The Mix" WTMX (adult contemporary rock). I chalked its success to the popularity that Celtic folk music enjoyed during the time and I still dug it even though I couldn't make out most of the words. Nowadays when I listen to it, it brings to mind a modern take on Kate Bush's Hounds of Love album.
I like to think that I have a pretty good memory when it comes to music, but I was completely baffled when I saw Queen Pen's "Party Ain't A Party" was on this mixtape. I had no recollection of how it sounded at all. Even as I listened to it again for this post, the first few bars didn't bring back anything. Watching the video and certain camera angles triggered more flashbacks and I started to recall why I included here in the first place. Still, I can't help but feel that if it's that much of a mystery to me now, I could have completely forgotten this all the way back in '98 or '99.
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