Young Music

I have several posts that are about 75% finished. This is the first of them. As you can tell, I never got motivated to do the other 25%. :)

I started taping Casey Kasem's weekly Top 40 Countdown when I was eight. Then during the week I would listen to the playback and see where Casey had gotten it wrong. (At that age I didn't know that the order of the songs was determined by placement in Billboard, which itself is determined by sales rank.) Analyzing the songs was fun in many ways. Some songs really clicked with me (Prince's Little Red Corvette). Others didn't (titles long forgotten). These were my first mix tapes. The year was 1983. I was well on my way toward becoming the musically sensible person writing this post.

These days I have kids of my own. A part of my wants to cultivate the same senses in them, but at the same time leave them free to discover what works and doesn't work. I am torn between sending them down the "right" path (my path of course), and letting them chart their own course. After all, I don't want to end up with a couple of Britney fans at the end of the day.

To that end I have given them a CD player as a Christmas present. And to get their minds thinking, I've made a few mixes that they hopefully will choose to listen to. I've kept mostly to songs I know they'll like--They Might Be Giants, etc. But generously sprinkled in are the likes of All Girl Summer Fun Band, Fountains of Wayne, The Broken West, Guster and others. Here they are:




Update: Both the CD player and the CDs are a hit!