By Bruce Warren, Program Director for XPN

John Cusack, who plays Rob Gordon in the movie High Fidelity has a great line about the art of the mix tape: “The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules.”

Music lovers everywhere are familiar with the virtues of the mix tape. Chances are you’ve either made one or gotten one. Even though many of us have made the transition from the mixed tape on cassette to the mix on CD, I still have a box of about thirty cassettes that I regularly dig in to. And I have a handful of my favorite all-time tapes that I’ve made that I keep in the glove compartment of my car. We seek emotional refuge in our mix tapes - for weddings, break-ups, for falling in love and wanting to be in love, for workouts, for late night rides, for any mood you want to capture. One of my friends once made a mix tape in which he re-sequenced The Beatles’ White Album. One of my favorite all-time tapes that I got as a gift was a C60 of Clash b-sides.

While Rob Gordon has his own unique method of making a tape, here’s another passionate recipe for making a tape.

Required reading: There are some excellent web sites dedicated to the art of the mix tape that you should check out including The Art Of The Mix, Tiny Mix Tapes, the Who Killed The Mixtape? blog. And here’s a great article called Last Night a Mix Tape Saved My Life from the British newspaper The Guardian that is worth reading.

There are also a couple books that I’d suggest you read about the mix tape – one is Mix Tape by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and Rob Sheffield’s Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time.

No matter how many mix tapes I have ever made, I have always put the same song on almost every tape I have made. It’s “La La Means I Love You” by The Delfonics. How about you? Do you have a favorite mix tape? A memorable moment in your life when a mix tape made a difference? Please share your set lists or thoughts about the making of mix tapes with us.