Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, Rob Sheffield

Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield has written a brilliantly funny yet heart-wrenching memoir of what music meant to him as a young person, how it brought him together with his wife, how it flavored their life, and how he coped with her sudden death.

His exposition on the culture and types of mix tapes is quite hilarious, ranging from the Party Tape (“par-tay!”), to the I Want You tape, to the We’re Doing It? Awesome! tape. He also describes the You Like Music, I Like Music, I Can Tell We’re Going to Be Friends tape, which when mistaken for an I Want You tape results in “hilarity and hijinks all around” (14).

The segment about his duties as music coordinator for the eighth grade dance is also priceless. When his mom tells him that “We Will Rock You” is catchy, he deletes it from the playlist. At the big event, he learns that girls will not leave their seats to dance to Boston, “despite the cathedral-like grandeur of Tom Scholz’ guitar solo in the second movement of `Don’t Look Back’” (35). Disco songs save the night. Sheffield then segues into a discussion of the concept of “bitch power,” as “elucidated by the great twentieth-century philosopher Rick James” (35).

I laughed out loud more times than I could count during the first 138 pages. The book then takes the sad turn. You know what’s coming, because he tells you right from the start what this is all about, but you just keep reading along hoping that we’re not really going there.

But we do. And it’s sad, but Sheffield tells it true and breaks your heart in the way that you don’t mind, because it was all so good and it will be good once again, even though she is gone. (This book should be required reading for anyone who is grieving the loss of a spouse, but particularly for those under the age of 40 who may be feeling as isolated as Sheffield did.)

For those of us whose identities, emotions and lives are wrapped up in the music and the memory of the music and the anticipation of the music to come, this book will get under your skin and into your blood just like the tunes.