Death’s Greatest Hits
Sing until you drop
“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it’s called Life.” ― Terry Pratchet
In days of yore, in the final decades of the 20th century, there was this thing called the “mixtape” — a homemade compilation of songs, from various sources, recorded onto a cassette tape.
By the time the new century arrived, these compilations had shifted to the medium of CDs — “compact discs”—but still a “mixtape”.
Two decades into the 21st century, with vinyl records relegated to being a niche collector’s item — tapes and CDs as containers for music have also become passe. Recorded music primarily exists in digital formats—flac, mp3, M4A, aiff, etc—living on computer hard drives and traveling on portable devices. And now there’s streaming music—Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc—a whole new kettle of corporate control of music that I have no need of.
Over the years, in an attempt to share the joys of the music that my exploratory obsessiveness had lead me to, I put together compilations of music for my friends —mixtapes— first on cassette, later on CD, covering a wide range of themes, always with an eclectic range of musical styles.
That Summer Feeling. Spring. New York City. Legs. Underground (Subways). Doggone (dogsongs, a compilation for my…
