Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
by Rob Sheffield
Mix Tape Soup for the Soul
A review by Alan Wise
When Rob Sheffield's wife Renee died suddenly in 1997, he was left with an empty basement apartment and the pile of mix tapes they'd made for each other over the course of their eight-year relationship. After not being able to listen to these tapes for years, Sheffield, a Rolling Stone contributing editor and frequent MTV/VH1 talking head, returns to them in his new memoir Love is a Mix Tape.
Each chapter of Mix Tape begins with the play list of a particular tape and details an episode from Sheffield's marriage. He and his wife were as passionate about music as they were each other, and by addressing their relationship through the lens of the music they shared, he sheds light on his feelings as well as that particular era of music. Passing through the 90s, he checks off the obvious (Nirvana), the slightly more obscure (Interpol), and even the quirky (British dance pop conglomerate The KLF's collaboration with Tammy Wynette). And he manages to do it without making you think he's just some dork who's really into mix tapes.
The inevitable problem is that songs rarely communicate the same emotion to every listener, and too often Sheffield assumes that he and his reader share the same rarified ear. But what saves Sheffield's memoir is the tenderness with which he writes about Renee. Though it's interesting to consider why certain music is so personal and powerful, it is only when Mix Tape's music fades that you understand why it was so important in the first place.
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