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Title details for Love Is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield - Available

Love Is a Mix Tape

Life and Loss, One Song at a Time

by Rob Sheffield
Rob Sheffield
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
What is love? Great minds have been grappling with this question throughout the ages, and in the modern era, they have come up with many different answers. According to Western philosopher Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield. Her paisan Frank Sinatra would add the corollary that love is a tender trap. Love hurts. Love stinks. Love bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you to show them. But the answer is simple: Love is a mix tape.
In the 1990s, when “alternative” was suddenly mainstream, bands like Pearl Jam and Pavement, Nirvana and R.E.M.–bands that a year before would have been too weird for MTV–were MTV. It was also when a shy music geek named Rob Sheffield met a hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl named Renée, who was way too cool for him but fell in love with him anyway. They had nothing in common except that they both loved music. Music brought them together and kept them together. And it was music that would help Rob through a sudden, unfathomable loss.
In LOVE IS A MIX TAPE, Rob, now a writer for Rolling Stone, uses the songs on fifteen mix tapes to tell the story of his brief time with Renée. From Elvis to Missy Elliott, the Rolling Stones to Yo La Tengo, the songs on these tapes make up the soundtrack to their lives. This is Rob’s tribute to music, to the decade that shaped him, but most of all to one unforgettable woman.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 2, 2007

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415936528
      • File size: 164208 KB
      • Duration: 05:42:05

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Music can heal us, drive us to tears, warm our hearts, and express our deepest emotions. Rob Sheffield, writer for Rolling Stone, has a profound appreciation for all kinds of music--past and present. In this honest and sweet memoir, he recounts how music united him with Renée, a hip reflection of himself. They eventually married, and when their life together was cut short, Sheffield was devastated. In this book he cleverly uses an eclectic collection of songs he recorded on mixed tapes over the years to purge his grief and trace how he ended up who he is today. Sheffield makes us laugh and cry--remaining ever true to himself and the music he loves. B.J.P. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 26, 2007
      Music critic Sheffield's touching and poignant memoir of love and death will strike a chord in anyone who has used a hand-selected set of songs to try to express something that can't be put into words. A socially awkward adolescent, Sheffield finds true love as a college student in the late '80s with Renée, a "hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl." They're brought together by their love of music, get married and spend eight years together before Renée suddenly dies of a pulmonary embolism. Sheffield's delivery is not that of the typical actor/ reader. We come to know Rob as this geeky, lanky guy, and his reading is characteristically a little bit uncoordinated, yet it is tender and heartfelt enough to win us over. Each chapter opens with a song list from a mix tape made at the time. Listeners may wish that, as with Nick Hornby's essay collection Songbook
      , there had been an audio component that would allow the music to take us back or would introduce us to new songs that helped Sheffield press on into an uncertain but hopeful future. Simultaneous release with the Crown hardcover (Reviews, Dec. 18).

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from December 18, 2006
      A celebratory eulogy for life in "the decade of Nirvana," rock critic Sheffield's captivating memoir uses 22 "mix tapes" to describe his being "tangled up" in the "noisy, juicy, sparkly life" of his wife, Renee, from the time they met in 1989 to her sudden death from a pulmonary embolism in 1997. Each chapter begins with song titles from the couple's myriad mixes—"Tapes for making out, tapes for dancing, tapes for falling asleep"—and uses them to describe a beautiful love story: "a real cool hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl" meeting in graduate school a "hermit wolfboy, scared of life, hiding in my room with my records," and how they built a tender relationship on the music they loved, from the Meat Puppets to Hank Williams. Their bond as soul mates makes his reaction to her death deeply moving: "I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language." But Sheffield's wonderful, often hilarious and lovingly detailed stories about their early romance and their later domestic life show how they created their own personal "mix tape" of life in the same way a music mix tape "steals moments from all over the musical cosmos and splices them into a whole new groove."

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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